Eternity
by Obiwanlivesforever
Summary: The dead have two choices; they may remain on earth as a shadow or move on to what lies beyond. Myrtle Warren chose to stay. This is her eternity. Four-shot, Second Person (Myrtle's) POV, following her life and afterlife from her early childhood through to the end of Deathly Hallows. Contains major character death.
1. Life

You are nine years old the first time it happens. This is the year the adults start covering the windows and turning off the lights when it gets dark. They won't tell you why, of course, because you're just a child and "It's not for you to know, Myrtle." But you want to read and draw and play pretend, and one night as you lie in bed missing your confiscated torch, the lamp on the wall springs to life. You only get a few moments to stare wide-eyed at its miraculous glow before your parents rush in.

"Remember what we told you, sweetheart. The lights need to stay off."

They rumple your hair and tuck you in and have the door shut before you can tell them that you didn't even touch it.

* * *

You are ten years old. The war that had existed only in late-night whispers has now solidified into a real, though still distant, threat. You feel its presence most strongly after school, when the long walk home has left you hungry and the peanut-butter sandwiches you had at noon feel so far away. Mum has reminded you twice that your favorite oatmeal cookies will have to wait until rationing is less strict, but just looking at the sugar jar in the cupboard isn't going to hurt anyone. Every day the grainy white layer at the bottom seems to rise an inch or two, but you're sure it's only your imagination until you run home for your forgotten lunch box and find sugar spilling from under the pantry door. It takes days to sweep it out of all the cracks in the floorboards, and weeks to convince your parents you didn't steal it from Mrs. McGrady several doors down (though she'd have deserved it, the miserable old bat, hoarding so much when kids like you had hardly any.) You're grounded nonetheless, because your parents probably figure out of sight and out of mind means out of trouble.

The time confined in your room allows you to reminisce with your old heroes, Peter and Alice and Dorothy and the brave little Hobbit, and to scour their stories for any advice on how little girls should handle odd situations. You quickly rule out swords and pixie dust and strange potions, but your parents always keep a bucket of water by the door in case a fire breaks out, so you'll be prepared should a wicked witch come along.

The possibility that _you_ might be the wicked witch occurs to you, but that's ridiculous, right?

You laugh it off a little too heartily to be reassured.

* * *

You are eleven years old, and the enemy has a face now. The planes seem to come every night, their bombs whistling down through the darkness to reduce stone to rubble. Children everywhere depart for the countryside, though your parents cling to you, comforted by the lie that keeping you close will keep you safe. Rationing and metal drives and casualty rates increase, and with them the things you can't explain. Your Victory Garden blooms almost overnight. A window shatters into fragments when your best friend's family opens the envelope marked KIA. The fairies in the picture above your bedpost, cut from a magazine by your mum as a girl and lovingly framed for your fifth birthday, dance and beckon. You wish you could follow them.

The backyard bomb shelter becomes both haven and prison. You like it in the afternoons after you've caused another inexplicable accident, or the latest news from the front has just sunk in. Lying on your back against the cool dirt, with the world reduced to the corrugated metal ceiling above you, worries can melt away for as long as you remain undisturbed. You hate it on the nights when the three of you huddle together in fear, praying that each explosion will be the last, feeling your tranquil memories become tainted by blood and dust and death.

It's on one such night that you receive the letter.

Your dad doesn't want anyone to touch it, and you can see why. Ever since the young men of the neighborhood went over to the continent, letters bring only heartbreak. You know the devastation well – your best friend hardly speaks to anyone now, let alone you. More to the point, what kind of lunatic would be running around in the middle of the blitz, slipping mail into people's bomb shelters? Logically, you should shrink back in fear. But that smooth white sheet of paper marked _Miss Myrtle Elizabeth Warren, the Anderson shelter in the backyard, 5 Vernon Street, London, England_ is so obviously intended for you…

At first, you don't think it's real. Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry? It sounds like something out of one of your storybooks; your own personal Oz or Wonderland. Surely you must've fallen asleep reading, drifted away with the pages pressed against your face and their words dancing through your mind. After all, who could blame you for conjuring up such fanciful things, what with a war raging on outside and your own life thrown out of balance? Yet it would be awfully strange for mum and dad to be having the same dream, and for the bombs to sound so loud and your pinch to the arm feel so real if you were really asleep.

You get your answer the next morning, when you wake up still in the bomb shelter with the same letter clutched in your hand. From outside wafts a scent you haven't smelt since rationing began. It leads you to the backyard, where a stranger with a long beard and a purple suit is smoking a pipe and serving your parents tea. You ask him if his name is Gandalf. He chuckles gently and replies that, while he has developed an affinity for Muggle literature, his name is Professor Albus Dumbledore, and he is here to invite you to his school. You, Myrtle Warren, are a witch.

The following months pass in a whirl of anticipation, underscored by the steady joy of certainty. You are not a freak. You are not a monster. You are a witch, and there is a place for you. Your parents, though understandably bewildered to start with, are supportive; they'd been considering sending you away to the countryside like other children, but you'll surely be safer still in Dumbledore's school. Your euphoria rises as the bricks behind the pub melt into a doorway; as you search Diagon Alley for eyes of newts and toes of frogs and leather-bound books heavy with knowledge; as the hazel-and-unicorn-hair wand connects with your soul and floods you with power. The war seems to recede into insignificance as time flies by, spent venturing through your textbooks in the secrecy of the Anderson shelter. You twirl a stick through the air on mellow summer afternoons, mentally cursing the underage magic restrictions Professor Dumbledore informed you of. When the bombs rain down at night, you calm yourself by mulling over lists of famous wizards you've memorized, like Ignatia Wildsmith and Elfrida Clagg and Wendelin the Weird. Or better yet, you let your mind wander ahead to some future day when you'll whip out your wand and jinx those planes back across the Channel, where they belong.

Finally, September the first arrives, crisp and clear with promise. Mum and dad tie your hair into its usual pigtails, make sure you have your bagged lunch, and try to pretend they're not tearing up as they see you off at King's Cross Station. You slide through the barrier between platforms nine and ten, wonder swelling with every step. Milling around the startlingly scarlet steam engine are more young wizards and witches than you thought could have possibly existed, all waving farewell to parents or rushing to embrace friends or lugging cages of bats and owls and rats. Reminded suddenly of how _new_ this all is, you rush on board the train and try to find a seat alone. It isn't that you're averse to the idea of company; rather, you don't want anyone to intrude on your experiencing of this world for the very first time. Neither do you want to intrude in anyone else's experience, lest they make it clear how alien you really are.

You spend the first fifteen or so minutes of the ride engrossed in your spellbooks, but the nearness of what you've been anticipating for so long leaves you too anxious to focus. Looking out the window hardly helps when you expect to see the castle's turrets looming over every hilltop. So you trade transfiguration for Tolkien, and are lost in the pages of The Hobbit – your one keepsake from home – when voices sound in the hallway outside.

The compartment door slides open and several girls about your age enter. "Mind if we sit here?"

You peer over the top of the book, hoping you don't say anything stupid in front of _real wizards._ "Not at all."

"Thanks." They return to their former conversation, leaving you cautiously optimistic yet slightly disappointed; that is, until the girl seated in the middle speaks up again. "What is that you're reading?"

"The Hobbit."

Her eyebrows slant. "Sorry?"

"Don't you know Tolkien? … Bilbo Baggins? Smaug?" You search her face eagerly for some sort of recognition, but don't find it.

The girl shares a condescending smile with her friends. "I get it. You're one of – _those_ people, aren't you?"

"What?"

Her smirk stretches wide, as if the next word is longing to escape it. "A Muggle."

The term is familiar from your summer reading; it was neutral, you recall, but this girl's tone of voice certainly isn't. Yours comes across a little higher-pitched than is probably socially acceptable. "Yes. I am. What's wrong with that?"

"Nothing, nothing," and the trio falls to giggling.

Hoping they'll leave you alone if you shrink into the background, you lift the book back up to cover your face.

"Do what you want," says the girl idly. "But you might want to read a spellbook instead. You know, since you're not as magic as the rest of us. Just some helpful advice."

You try to avoid their gazes as you gather up your things to leave. You don't want to be around this. Not today of all days; not when your emotions insist on fluctuating between excitement and sheer terror. There'll be another empty car somewhere.

"What, are you leaving?" one of the other girls pipes up. "Are you _crying?_ Oh Merlin, she's actually crying!"

More laughter ripples out from the girls.

"Come back! We didn't mean it in a bad way! We're just telling the truth!"

You slam the door, but their taunts stick with you all the way to Hogwarts.

* * *

You are eleven years old, just like everyone else ushered to the side of the platform once the Hogwarts Express glides to a halt. The train ride was long enough that your eyes have dried by now, and that's fortunate, because you would hate to have missed the sight that lies before you. The castle looms out of the glassy black lake like the rock formations you'd seen on the occasional trips to the seaside before the war, carved into being by centuries of tidal flow. Towers ascend from the corners, cutting dark pointed shapes into the star-strewn sky. Each window blazes with light, the kind that roars in dwarven fireplaces and warms medieval feasts. As the little boats draw closer and closer through the water, you have the curious feeling of finding a home you never knew you'd left. This isn't a description from a fairy-tale book; it's something real, something _yours_.

Perhaps, you think, in this sacred, shining, moment, you'll never leave.

Inside, beneath a ceiling of stars and candles, the crowd of first-years passes between four long tables to a wizened black hat upon a stool. The Deputy Headmistress, an imposing woman by the name of Professor Merrythought, informs you that it will sort you into four houses, each representing a particular quality. You listen to their overlong names with a twinge of anxiety. Where will you fit in? You certainly don't think of yourself as brave, nor cunning. Loyal and hardworking, maybe, although you've never had an especially close group of friends to show loyalty to. As for intelligence, you're not sure of that – while your marks back home were never anything to scoff at, what good are arithmetic and geography in wizard school? – yet something in Ravenclaw house calls to you nonetheless. Not quite _wisdom_ , but the desire to attain it. You want to learn as much as you can about this incredible new world, this mysterious power that flows within you.

That's why it's a blow when "Hornby, Olive!", the unpleasant girl from the train, is sent by the hat to the table decked out in blue and bronze. You're left to wait until nearly the end, when "Warren, Myrtle!" is called out and the musty old hat slips over your head. Its voice whispers within you, probing for answers. Your mind darts back and forth, from Olive's sneering face to the promise of knowledge, of truly earning your place here, regardless of what she thinks –

"Ravenclaw!"

You're not sure how to define the rush of emotion that floods you; some mixture between relief, dread, and acceptance that makes you weak at the knees. You stumble a bit over your robes as you hop down off the stool. The scattered laughter that breaks out is good-natured, but prickles over you uncomfortably nonetheless. Fortunately there are several students on the bench separating you from Olive.

The girl across from you, already wearing a badge and tie as blue as her eyes, smiles apologetically as you both reach for the same bread roll. You draw your hand back, but she shakes her head. "No, take it. It's your first day, and it'll refill anyways."

She's right; the second the roll is gone, a dozen others appear in its place. "Wish we'd had that during rationing," you mutter, without thinking.

The girl cocks her head, a lock of frizzy dark hair falling over her shoulder. "You're Muggle-born, then?" She sounds curious but not judgmental; after Olive, though, your defences are raised anyway. "There's nothing wrong with that, of course! I think it's wonderful that you're one of us. Er, a wizard, I mean. Anyway, enough of that. Welcome to Hogwarts. I'm Murcia Quimby, second year."

"Murcia? That's lovely." You don't know quite what to say that doesn't come off as awkward, but you're cautiously flattered by her attention. She certainly doesn't seem to hold Olive's prejudices. "I'm Myrtle. Myrtle Warren. First year, but, er, I guess you knew that already…"

You trail awkwardly off as she turns her attention back to her meal, but she flashes you another smile amidst her chewing. Reassured, you return to your plate as well, wishing that Murcia, not Olive, had happened to stumble into your compartment on the Hogwarts Express.

* * *

You are eleven years old, and Murcia is twelve, so you don't get to spend as much time with her as you'd like. What's more, sharing a dorm and a class schedule with the other first-year Ravenclaw girls means near-constant exposure to Olive Hornby. This doesn't present much of a problem for the first week, though. How could it, when you're in a state of utter enthrallment by everything around you? Not even Olive, who must have grown up in a house full of wizards, can help being spellbound.

You were already in love with Hogwarts the moment you saw its silhouette against the night sky, and this grows stronger with every passing moment. After seeing so much of London reduced to rubble, there's something almost inspiring about his venerable old castle, fixed to this spot for centuries without a single stone having crumbled. You long to explore every inch of it, to have each shifting staircase and meandering corridor imprinted as firmly in your mind as your own name. Every time you round a corner, an entirely different wing seems to open up before you; every wall you lean against must hide passageways and chambers unknown. Pictures talk, statues wave, ghosts drift overhead. It must take at least a hundred years, you decide, to truly get to know Hogwarts. There are too many sights to see, too many sounds to hear, too many things to touch and smell and sense, for one lifetime.

The classes are no less fascinating. You learn quickly that this magic is very different than the kind you'd learned in your storybooks. On your first day of Defence Against the Dark Arts, Olive Hornby bends over her desk into silent laughter when you ask if water could really melt a dark witch. The first spell you learn in transfiguration doesn't bring a scarecrow to life, but turns a single straw into a match. Although you're intimidated, you're also thrilled by how much there still is to learn.

Things begin to change the first weekend at Hogwarts. You're sitting cross-legged on your bed, engrossed in The Hobbit and waiting for Murcia to come up like she'd promised, when the door swings open to admit Olive. You stiffen instinctively. It's the first time the two of you have been alone together in the dormitory.

Olive doesn't seem to notice you at first, twirling her wand absent-mindedly and sorting through her belongings. When she sees you eyeing her over the top of your book, however, her expression sours.

"What's got your wand in a knot?"

"Pardon?"

She rolls her eyes impatiently. "I meant, what's wrong with you? You can't still be upset over the train ride. We were just joking around, anyways."

You grip the sides of your book tightly, never sure what to say in these situations. "That's not what you said then."

"Well, whatever." Olive waves a hand with a flippant air. "We just meant that you're different, is all. You know that too. It's just not the same if you don't have wizard parents."

"That doesn't mean I'm not a real witch," you shoot back, more bravely than you actually feel, "And how'd you like it if someone said that to you?"

"Well, I wouldn't run off crying like a gloomy Augurey. Merlin's pants, you acted like we'd hit you or something."

You grit your teeth. "Stop doing that!"

"Doing what?"

"Using all those – those wizard sayings! You know I'm new here! You're – you're – doing it all on purpose, to get to me!"

"Fine, be like that then." She slams her drawer shut forcefully. "See if I care what some Muggle thinks about me."

"See if I care what … _you_ think about me."

"Witty," she sneers from the doorway, delighted by the weakness of your retort. "See you around, Myrtle."

And that she does. With the start of your second week of classes, Olive Hornby seems determined to make your life at Hogwarts miserable. What's worse, she's clever about it, never overtly insulting you in front of the teachers. ("Can you go through the parts of a cauldron again, Professor Slughorn? I'm not sure Myrtle understand it," or "You might want to help Myrtle Warren out with her wandwork, Sir, I think I saw her holding it backwards just now.") You're easily shaken, one jibe from her distracting you enough to confuse two potion ingredients or turn the feather you were supposed to be levitating into a tissue.

To your dismay, the more openly you react, the more deeply Olive sinks in her claws. Although jibes at your blood status colour nearly all her insults, she broadens her horizons to include other sources of ridicule – your glasses ("I guess she's never had the chance to learn a vision-fixing charm back home, has she?" as if you haven't seen countless wizards with spectacles), your weight ("I hear the Muggles aren't eating so well nowadays. Must be why she stuffs her face every feast"), even your accursed acne ("Most wizards don't get it so young, do they?"). You start asking to be excused from class, running to the usually-deserted first floor bathroom where no prying eyes will see you cry. As the months go on, you wonder whether this is still all about your spat in the dormitory, or whether goading you has become Olive's new pastime.

"It's because you're so … sensitive," Murcia admits reluctantly one day, after you've pressed her for nearly half an hour on the topic. "I'm sorry to say this, Myrtle, I really am. But I guess you make it too easy for her."

"What am I supposed to do then?" _Or are_ real _wizards not supposed to cry?_ you feel like adding caustically, but you hold your tongue. Murcia's companionship is too valuable to risk.

"I don't know." She's clearly uncomfortable with the conversation. "Just ignore her? Anyway, if she tried anything around me, I'd shut her up. It's too bad you're not in my year."

You smile at that, because you feel the same way. It's hard to find time to spend with Murcia, what with your differing class schedules, her Quidditch practice and all the homework you're both saddled with. You try to eat together at lunch and chat in the common room on weekends, but you often find yourself lost in Murcia's large, loud gaggle of friends. It isn't that any of them are unfriendly, or that she doesn't try to include you in the conversation when she can. But they're all a year older, and what's more, most of them are wizard-born, or at least muggle-borns already familiar with Hogwarts. Often you find yourself shrinking into silence rather than trying to follow the threads of a confusing discussion.

After Olive spots one of the school's spare barn owls delivering you a letter from home one morning – a telltale sign you don't have your own pet; with rationing going on you'd never be able to care for it over the summer – Murcia steps in. The next time you send a message out the owlery window, it's borne on the wings of an imposing great grey. "It's no big deal," Murcia laughs when you thank her. The sound peals like bells. "Venus is pretty smart; she'll be able to find her way to your place and mine. And she can carry much bigger packages than those scrawny school birds. Let's see Olive laugh now."

Admittedly, the sight of a majestic owl swooping down to you and Murcia is usually the best part of receiving your mail. You write your letters home with a tone of forced positivity; it's difficult to explain to your parents that their non-magical status is the root cause of your bullying. Besides, as wizard and muggle newspapers alike remind you, things are hard enough for them at home. Over time, you learn that wizards and muggles experience the war quite differently. Murcia tries to empathize, but tends to forget that your parents can't just cast a shield charm over their house during the bombings, or turn water into the tea so strictly rationed. Fear for your family gnaws at you from the inside out, but it's something you must bear alone.

Finally – or is it too quickly? – your first, breathless year at Hogwarts grinds to a stop. You vacate your dormitory in a hurry, eager to see the last of Olive Hornby for two months, but your heart is heavy as you leave behind the vast windows and silken tapestries of Ravenclaw tower. Murcia's compartment on the Hogwarts Express is full of laughter and merriment so contagious that for once you feel a true part of it. The two of you share a hug amidst the steam on the platform and part with promises to write every week. You slide through the brick barrier and there, at last, are your parents, waiting on the other side – clothes shabby, faces lined, but beaming nonetheless. You practically fly to them.

"How was Hogwarts, sweetie?" your mother asks, enveloping you in a hug while your father strokes your hair.

"Good," you answer. It's not entirely a lie, but you're not sure how to tell them the full truth.

* * *

You are twelve years old, and if your parents were here they would remind you that a young woman of your age keeps a stiff upper lip, regardless of what life throws her way. Unfortunately for them, you've always thought that was a stupid rule. What's the point in concealing your emotions? It only leads to frustration and repressed desires, and you have enough of those at the moment. If you're sad, cry. If you're happy, laugh. If you're scared, scream. Nothing else makes sense.

You've spent at least half the summer in your bedroom, absorbing every textbook you own – and a few more the library let you rent – in an effort to make up for all the time wasted fretting over Olive last year. You're bound and determined to beat her this time around, and it shows when your glowing results in the first big History of Magic test come back. This doesn't pose a problem until you're first of the class in Transfiguration, and second in Charms. Olive Hornby calls you a name that you don't understand – you don't have dirt in your veins, thank you very much – but the frozen silence that descends over the classroom says enough. You start crying right then and there, big loud ugly sobs in the middle of Professor Galdrar's lecture. It's as if every eye in the room is piercing through you. Olive ends up in detention, but the damage is done.

Murcia is uncomfortable when you ask the inevitable question. "It's a nasty word, Myrtle. It's what some wizards call people like … well, people like you." What does that mean, you persist. "You know … people with muggle parents. No magical blood. Some people think you shouldn't even be able to come here, that you're not good enough." But not her, she adds quickly.

You run off to the bathroom more than usual this term. Between Olive's constant torments, the drive to prove you deserve your place in Hogwarts, the war news filtering through the Daily Prophet and the radio, and Murcia taking extra classes this year ("Don't act like that, Myrtle, you _know_ I love Care of Magical Creatures,") your nerves are frayed to their limit. The quiet stone nook on the first floor is always ready to receive you; the dim torches and grimy mirror issue no scathing words. Even the sink at the far end, which has never worked no matter how hard you twist the tap, has a comforting familiarity. You learn the paths to this lavatory from any classroom, the Great Hall, the library, and the Ravenclaw common room itself. The still air grows heavier each visit with the ghosts of recent worries: taunts, poorly-written tests, letters from mum that revealed too much by saying too little ("Please don't worry about us, sweetie, all that matters is that you're all right.") Yet it's a comforting sadness, a cocoon of the sort of self-pity you don't shun because you know, or at least you hope, that it's deserved.

* * *

You are thirteen years old now, as winter melts into spring, and for the first time in your life you realize your parents were wrong. When they saw you off at the station at the start of second year, it was with the expectation that Hogwarts be a safe haven from the war raging across the globe. Now the danger comes from within.

Returning to Ravenclaw tower from dinner one evening, you and Murcia find yourselves in a corridor packed with black-robed bodies. Students are milling around something halfway along the hall, anxious clamour rising above the usual din. The teachers call for calm, urging their students to proceed to the common rooms. Like any short second-year you're shuffled about in the throng, but as you round the corner you catch a glimpse of the wall and the sinister message it bears.

The moment you reach your dormitory, you slide the clutter of dog-eared textbooks, empty inkwells and half-finished essays off your trunk and grope around for your copy of Hogwarts: A History. The faithful book has never failed you before. Yet, search as you might, you can't find any mention of a Chamber of Secrets, nor the 'heir,' nor any 'enemies' he might have – and neither, it seems, can anybody else. Murcia murmurs all she knows to you over a tense breakfast the following morning, but it's not much – an ancient chamber supposedly concealed somewhere within the school, little more than a legend lingering on in the minds of the older generation. The teachers reiterate the same. Life at Hogwarts continues on much the same, albeit subdued, for several days.

Then Florence Alderton of Hufflepuff is found, ashen-faced and stiff as a board, just outside a girl's lavatory on the third floor. Not dead, Professor Dippet assures an anxious student body, but petrified. No one, not even the nurse, has any idea how. A week later, she's joined by Frank Parrish of Gryffindor and your fellow Ravenclaw Doris Roscoe. Several limp black roosters, throats slit and feathers scattered, surround both their forms. Only now does the staff reveal all they know: how the Chamber of Secrets was said to have been built shortly after the school's founding by Salazar Slytherin, how an unknown monster allegedly lurks within, how the true heir of Slytherin alone possesses the power to control it and purge the school of those of impure blood. Those like you.

Fear descends over the school like fog, its tendrils entangling every moment of the day. Life is restricted to the classrooms, the common room and the Great Hall. Passage through the hallways is swift and silent, convoys of students huddled together and glancing compulsively over their shoulders. Reaching the solitude of your bathroom is out of the question. More dead fowl are discovered throughout the school, prompting the closure of entire hallways due to their presence. Every evening, Ravenclaw common room is abuzz with discussion over the identity of the fabled creature (a dragon, you think, or a huge awful spider with crawling legs and glinting eyes.) The stigma of your birth, previously a source of mockery only to Olive and her ilk, now burns dark and heavy, a brand proclaiming your unworthiness. You start to question, more than ever, your place in this world. Did Dumbledore make some mistake in accepting you here? Why did he ever think you belonged at a school founded, in part, by a man who would have considered you beneath contempt?

The drive to succeed in your classes has never been stronger, but never have you been more distracted. It results in calamity when Professor Slughorn, in an attempt to prepare you for the upcoming exams, switches up the regular potions partners ("Come now, everybody needs a challenge now and then!") and, in the spirit of fostering "good, healthy teamwork," places you with Olive. Your attempt to avoid eye contact with her results in a broken flask of pufferfish eyes and the ruination of the last Swelling Solution you'll be able to brew before the exam. It's just as well that the potion starts emitting thick black smoke, because with it filling the entire dungeon, at least no one can see you cry. Only the fear of running into the monster prevents you from running off to your bathroom after class. As you sit alone and dejected at supper, you take a bit of solace in the fact that at least Olive and her friends are nowhere to be found.

You find out why when you return to the dormitory. Your first impression is that someone's wand must have backfired and blasted papers across the room. Then you realize that all the ragged pages bear the same familiar font – and that there, blackened and crumpled into a ball, is the distorted image of a Hobbit hole.

"I'm sorry about that, Myrtle," purrs Olive from her bunk. "I was just practicing my SeveringCharm and it happened to be in the way."

You hardly hear her; you're so intent on salvaging what you can. Maybe, if you get them all together – smooth them out –

"I'm sure you can buy a new one somewhere. Maybe a second-hand bookstore."

 _Reparo_ should work for fastening all the pages back together – but they're so wrinkled – and you don't know what to do about the scorching –

"I hear there are quite a few of them in muggle London. You'll have the whole summer to shop, and who knows? Maybe even longer. I don't suppose your parents will let you come back here, given everything."

Your breathing rises to a panicked gasping. The stack you've recovered is hardly half the thickness of the original book – they're all over the place, some burned, some shredded beyond repair –

"And, really, for the best, Myrtle. You just don't belong here. You try hard, but at the end of the day, you'll never be anything but a Mudbl-"

The pages cascade to the ground as you leap to your feet and whirl towards her, shooting the first hex that comes to min. She shrieks and dodges the shower of spiders as you wrench open the door and hurtle down the stairs, ignoring the comments of passing students. Murcia catches you by the shoulders before you can leave the common room, but you wrench out of her grasp and go hide behind one of the tapestries in the corner. She calls for you once, throws her arms up, and leaves. Good. You don't want to talk; you just want to sob and scream and kick everything in reach, and most of all to curl up and find yourself back home, before this all started, before Olive and the Chamber and the war.

Night might not have passed at all; you wake up to the same sickening sense of hopelessness that drove you to sleep. Listlessly you retread your steps up the stairs and get dressed. You can't bring yourself to sit beside Murcia at breakfast, not after last night's outburst, but of course Olive is right on schedule. Perhaps she feels some sense of shame, because all she comes up with is a weak gibe about your glasses. It's still enough. No teachers are guarding the door to the hall, and while a prefect is standing nearby at the end of the Slytherin table, he doesn't stop you from leaving.

Your bathroom's just the same as you left it several months ago. Same faint candlelight, gently leaking taps, damp flagstones. You rush into the furthest stall like the embrace of an old friend. Now that you're here, you're not leaving – you don't care about class – you'd stay here forever, if you could.

In the midst of your sobs, another sound intrudes – a low hissing in an unrecognizable language, garbled and sinister and, most unwelcomely, masculine. Just like last night, something in you snaps, and you wipe your sleeve across your runny eyes and swing open the door, because how _dare_ he interrupt you in your most vulnerable state, in your one remaining place of refuge –

Yellow eyes blaze into your own, and time stops.

* * *

 **A/N: Where do I begin? I've loved Myrtle ever since I first watched Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets as an 8- or 9-year-old, and have had the idea of writing a FanFiction about her life since I was 13 or 14. What started out as an over-ambitious plan for a 30-odd chapter fic gradually whittled itself down to a oneshot, which then expanded into a threeshot and then a four-shot. Almost a decade since I came up with the idea, I've finally finished this story, the first multichap FanFiction I've completed since I was 10. I sincerely hope you're enjoying it as much as I loved writing it.**

 **A few words about the content. I know that second-person can be hit-and-miss, but I honestly can't imagine having written it any other way. One of my main goals with this story was to get the reader to empathize with a character whose tragic backstory is, in my opinion, sadly underexplored in the Harry Potter canon. I've always sympathized greatly with Myrtle, and I hope that by putting this in second-person, I've made it easier to get into her head (as depressing a place as it might be!).**

 **I also know that the common age listed for Myrtle at her death is 14, not 13, but after a lot of fact-checking, I determined that the only source for that is an interview with her actress, Shirley Henderson, which I've chosen not to take as canon. As I've always imagined Myrtle being 12 or 13 when she died, and as she is described in the books as a teenager, I decided to go with 13.**

 **For reference, the London Blitz lasted from about September 1940 until May 1941. It's sometime during this period when Myrtle has her 11th birthday and receives the Hogwarts letter. Her first year is 1941/1942, and her second, at the end of which she of course dies, is 1942/1943.**

 **The dancing fairies in the portrait above Myrtle's bed at home are the Cottingley Fairies, fakes made by two young girls in the late 1910s/early 1920s. I had the idea that, in the HP universe, the girls could have been actual witches who charmed paper fairies into flying, or even befriended real fairies (although those in the HP canon are apparently quite different than those in the photographs!).**

 **In my original drafts for the story, Olive Hornby was in Slytherin, but I decided later on that it was far too cliche to have the bully be that house. Instead, I put her in Ravenclaw so that she could be around Myrtle almost 24/7.**

 **'Murcia' is the name of an obscure Roman deity frequently identified as a version of the love goddess Venus (hence the name of her owl). She was also heavily associated with myrtle plants.**

 **I found it unbelievable that the Basilisk could have attacked so many people and only killed one, but CoS clearly states that several students were petrified during the 1943 openings of the chamber, so I had to have some unsuccessful attacks preceding Myrtle's death. I assume that they all happened to see the Basilisk through mirrors, water, or other indirect means, which is why I had the first girl be found near a bathroom.**

 **I hope you all enjoyed this first chapter, and that if you did you will continue reading! :) Please don't be shy in leaving a review or comment - I would love to know what you have to say!**


	2. Death

You are ageless. You are nameless. You're not sure there is even a 'you.' Existence is comprised of an incomprehensible storm of emotion; shock, fear, sorrow, bitterness, regret, and rage, all primal and strong. There is something else, too; something calm and warm waiting beyond the periphery. It summons, gently and steadily, drawing closer and closer.

All of a sudden you – and there is a you, now – are resisting, pulling back, fighting against the lure. You don't want to go _there,_ wherever there is. You want to return; to precisely what, you don't know, but to _being,_ to whatever existed before, to whatever was just lost.

No, not lost. Taken. Stolen. This wasn't supposed to happen. This is wrong. You are young; you don't want to leave just yet. You don't like this, you don't like this, _youdon'tlikethis._

Your emotions are strong, bright, passionate; whatever beckons is blank, separate, impassive. You surrender to the terror, the fury, the spite; anything other than the unknown that lies beyond.

Something solidifies around you, yet remains blurred, as if viewed through thick glass. Stone walls, arched ceiling. A row of old doors with peeling paint, one of them ajar. They're oddly familiar, like your bedroom in the brief moments between sleeping and waking, when you don't know whether you've last seen it minutes or eons ago. Even more recognizable is the figure lying on the floor between the sinks and the stalls. You know the pale face, the thickly bespectacled eyes staring in blind horror. You fitted that long, dark hair into pigtails this very morning, just like every one before.

The realization drops into your chest like a weight. Instinctively you make as if to gasp, to sob, but there's no air; rather, no need for it. No lungs swelling with breath. No chest rising up and down. You can't feel anything, not the touch of your robes nor the softness of your hair against your back, not even the tears, although you know they're there. You flail about for something solid, something real, but find no support. Your hand plunges through the wall of the cubicle as if it were water. You expect yourself to keel over onto the floor, having lost your balance, but quickly find out there's no balance to lose, and no floor to hit. There's no anything. You're nothing.

You can't think what to do. You can't even think what to feel. All you can do is float there, crying imperceptibly, over your own body.

You're still there hours later, when Olive Hornby comes strolling through the door, calling out with pronounced apathy: "Are you in here again, sulking, Myrtle? Because Professor Dippet asked me to look for you"– Her gaze, searching lazily about the room, freezes on the corpse and what floats above it.

She blinks. Her head cocks to one side. The whiteness begins, deliciously slowly, to creep through her face.

"Figured it out yet?" You spit the words with a venom you never knew in life. "Or would a nice, loud 'boo!' make it more obvious?"

And Olive Hornby whirls on her heel and runs, screaming, out the door.

* * *

You are thirteen years old, says the roll of parchment the coroners place on Headmaster Dippet's desk. Or, at least, you were. You're not sure how age works now, if it goes any further or just stays the same. Some things definitely don't change. Myrtle Elizabeth Warren, the certificate says. That's still you. The black-and-white photograph shows you as well, or what was once you. Someone's had the decency to close your eyes in it. Funny; it's the only picture you've seen in this school that doesn't move.

The line underneath your name is headed CAUSE OF DEATH in officious black letters, but the handwriting that follows proclaims "unknown." It was the creature, the staff whisper, but no one is any closer to figuring out exactly what that means. That doesn't matter to you. You know perfectly well who is to blame, and she's monster enough.

The most you can say on Olive's behalf is that she wasted no time letting the entire school know what happened. Professor Dippet and several other teachers reach the bathroom before any other students can arrive. The headmaster actually stumbles when he sees what has happened, tottering back against Professor Merrythought with a hand clutched to his heart. The school nurse falls on her knees to examine your pulse, check your heartbeat, and give the verdict everyone already knows. Dumbledore's tall figure looks somberly from girl to ghost, eyes heavy with sorrow and anger and – when staring directly at you – a flicker of what might even be disappointment. One of the staff members picks up your wand, lifeless as its owner, and remarks that it's always the case with those hazel-and-unicorn-hairs, they can't survive without their master. Then the nurse issues a long shroud out of the tip of her wand, and they wrap you up and carry you away, as if the spirit before them doesn't even exist.

You follow. People stare, far more than they did in life; some even scream. It doesn't matter. You overtake the professors in no time and tug at Headmaster Dippet's robes, not caring that your fingers are sinking right through them; you beg them to stop, to do something, to save you. Surely they can fix this. The petrified students didn't die; why did you?

Professor Dippet turns towards you with the most wretched eyes you've ever seen and tells you, in a quiet voice, to go. People are staring, he says. They mustn't find out this way. He'll tell the school, make sure it's broken gently, but first of all _you have to leave_.

He keeps his promise. All of the students are ordered back to their common rooms; the headmaster's voice is magically modified to echo throughout the school, so that everyone, even you in your bathroom, can hear the announcement.

"Students and staff of Hogwarts School, it grieves me deeply to report that this morning, June the thirteenth, at approximately eight-thirty, a second-year Ravenclaw student, Myrtle Warren, was found dead in the first-floor girl's bathroom. All classes have been cancelled. You are forbidden to leave your common rooms until further notice. Your heads of house are available if you need someone to speak to. If you have any information regarding this attack, we urge you, upon the honour of our school, in the memory of the deceased, and in the defense of the living, to step forwards and make it known immediately. Thank you for your attention."

It is Professor Dumbledore, not Dippet, who returns to find you in your stall later. He sighs and says he is sorry. This was not supposed to happen. He has tried to protect his students and failed. He will do all that is in his power to ensure that the murderer is caught and justice enacted. The Ministry has been contacted, as well as your parents. They will be here tomorrow to pick up the body. You may decide what you want done with it, as well as where you would like to go afterwards. Your Head of House has informed your classmates personally of your death and will pack up or dispose of your possessions as you see fit. If there is anything at all he can do for you, you need only ask.

"Turn me back," is your only request.

Dumbledore meets your eyes, agony etched into his features. "I'm so sorry, Miss Warren. You know that is impossible."

"There's got to be something you can do. There's some spell, or something, you're all just hiding it from me-"

"It is as I said, Myrtle. I'm afraid there is no magic which can reawaken the dead."

"But I'm here now, aren't I?" You're screaming at this point; every recess of the bathroom reverberates with your desperation. "I'm still here! Put me back in my body! _Please_! Please…"

"The dead have two choices," Dumbledore says gently, his voice so quiet you have to hush to hear it. "They can either move on or remain behind. For whatever reason, which is not mine to know if you do not wish it, you have chosen to stay. Nothing can change that now."

The finality in his voice sinks through you like a stone.

"Then I want to see my parents," you say. "And Murcia."

"They will be here tomorrow," the professor repeats. "As for your friends … please believe me when I say it is best to give them time. You are welcome to spend the night in my office, but-"

You can't listen to any more of this. Dumbledore's voice stops abruptly as you shoot through the ceiling. Floors and chambers streak by in quick succession, soon giving way to the stairs of Ravenclaw tower. You need some semblance of normality, be it Murcia's face, your belongings, even your four-poster bed in the dorm room; you need to see it _now_ , and maybe this nightmare will go away–

She's not there. Not among the blur of horrified faces in the common room; not in her dormitory, not even in yours. The only person there – and _of course_ it's her, who else would have the audacity to come back to the room where you lived on the very day you died – is the one you least want to see.

"Get away from those!" you scream, mindless with rage. Olive is rooted to the spot, hunched on the floor next to your bed with her hands all over your books. Her eyes stare at you as if not really seeing.

"I w-was putting them away," she manages to get out. "They were lying on the ground – _y-you_ were lying on the ground –"

You look over her. She's shaking, tearing up. Pitiable. Even remorseful.

You don't care.

"Rot in hell, Olive Hornby," you hiss, packing the bitterness of two years of torment into those five words, and descend through the floor.

* * *

You are still thirteen years old (plus one more day, one day that you never lived) the next morning, when Professor Dippet announces they've caught your killer.

Rubeus Hagrid. The name's vaguely familiar. You can't remember his face, but you'd have to be blind not to know of him. A tall boy from Gryffindor, a year ahead of you, the one they say is half-giant. You've glimpsed him across the Great Hall on occasion, or heard Murcia mention something he did in Care of Magical Creatures class.

You don't have the faintest idea why he would want you dead.

Nevertheless, you trust what the professors tell you. It was a prefect, Tom Riddle, who pinpointed Hagrid as the culprit; he's an upstanding student, they assure you, no reason to doubt his word. Hagrid has been expelled and his wand destroyed, but Dumbledore, taking pity, has secured a place for him at Hogwarts as an assistant gamekeeper. You want to ask why your murderer is allowed to walk free, but somehow you can't find the strength do to anything but listen as they load you with more meaningless information. Hagrid had been secretly raising giant spiders, undoubtedly the monsters of the Chamber. One either escaped or was intentionally set free. It happened to come across you. Fortunately, it has been disposed of. You're not to tell anyone about this.

You can't remember feeling any stinger or pincers – or anything at all, really – and you're not sure if spiders have huge yellow eyes, but the explanation is enough. It doesn't make much of a difference how you died, does it, when the end result is the same? Besides, you have a far more pressing concern.

"Where are my parents? When are they coming?"

They will arrive shortly, you are told. The protective enchantments concealing the school from Muggle eyes have been lifted for one hour today. It would be better, though, Dippet says uncomfortably, if perhaps you stayed out of the way … you never know how Muggles will react to these things, of course … and what's more, the International Statute of Wizarding Secrecy cannot be violated …

"I'm going with my family," you say simply, and float through him and out the door.

You hear that your parents are to meet with Dumbledore in a small room off the Great Hall, where your chest of belongings and your coffin await them. Peering through the wall, you watch the colossal doors of Hogwarts creak open to admit two small, mundane figures. Both clad in black, they step timidly inside, blind to the majesty of the castle around them. You've never seen them look so lost.

Something inside you breaks; you can't wait here a moment longer, not when the people you need the most are so close. Shouting for them, you surge through the door.

Your mother screams.

"Mum, Dad, it's me! It's Myrtle!"

"M-Myrtle?" mother says disbelievingly, eyes drifting in and out of focus as they take in your ethereal form.

"Yes, of course! I'm coming home with you!"

To your horror, your mother shakes her head, backing a step away. "No, you're not – you can't be – my baby girl's in heaven"–

She screams again, as if you're not still _you,_ everything she and Dad loved, and collapses.

Time seems to both slow down and speed up. A hundred things happen around you all at once, beyond your comprehension. Professor Dippet wrings his hands, apologizing profusely, saying he'd _told_ you to stay behind. The nurse runs to fetch a revivement potion while another teacher tugs at her sleeve, saying perhaps it's kinder just to leave it this way. Your mother sags in your father's arms. He looks up at you with no love in his eyes, only blinding pain.

"What kind of trick are you pulling here?" he roars at Dumbledore. "That – that bit of smoke-and-mirrors – that's not my daughter. _What have you done with our daughter?_ "

Dumbledore is trying to reason with him, your father is crying and cursing with grief and rage, a teacher is gesturing towards the coffin in the antechamber explaining that no, this isn't some hoax, you're really dead, someone is yelling at you to _leave now,_ and you are dying for the second time.

Later, when it's all over, when they've left with your body and your earthly possessions in tow and their minds wiped clean of this 'traumatic incident,' Professor Dumbledore comes to you again.

"Don't tell me," you say hollowly. "I know I should have waited."

"You know why you can't go with them."

You bow your head, wishing more than anything that you'd torn up the Hogwarts letter the instant it slipped into your bomb shelter, so you'd never have been able to choose a world your parents can never be a part of.

Dying was painless. This is anything but.

* * *

You are thirteen years old (plus two more months than before) when what should have been your third year at Hogwarts begins. The school has lain dormant over the summer, but the return of its lifeblood doesn't make it feel any less like a grave. Crackling torches no longer provide any warmth, nor do the depths of the dungeons bring a chill. The feasts which spring to being throughout the Great Hall offer neither smell nor taste. The scent of dusty library books, the roughness of rock-hewn walls, and the spongy caress of dewy grass are nothing more than memories. The very soul of the castle has been muted.

There are more changes. A new Ravenclaw second-year sleeps in your old bed. Your name has been added to a commemorative plaque for deceased students in a deserted corner of the castle. Murcia returns with a drastically different haircut and a far more subdued manner.

One benefit in all of this is that you're no longer required to be around Olive Hornby. Instead, you alternate between following Murcia around to her classes and keeping to yourself in the bathroom. Your friend doesn't talk much beyond the first quiet "I'm so sorry," and the explanation that she was taken home early at the end of last year, but neither does she shoo you away. With her silence, she's almost as much of a ghost as you are.

You're confused the first time she heads up the marble staircase towards Ancient Runes instead of out to the grounds for Care of Magical Creatures. Shaking her head ruefully, she admits that she's dropped the course.

"I couldn't stand being around – that Hagrid boy – any longer. I can't believe they let him stay here, traipsing along after the Gamekeeper like he didn't – like he's not the reason you're –"

Steeling her face so it doesn't crumple, she strides on without another word.

Although Murcia never objects to your presence, it isn't much appreciated by the other students in her year. There always tends to be a sharp nervousness to their behaviour when you're bobbing overhead, as if they're expecting you to shatter into glass. You catch awkward stares and the tail ends of countless whispered conversations. Every one fills you with indignant fury. Why can ghosts like the Bloody Baron or the Fat Friar drift where they will without attracting a second glance, yet you cause discomfort wherever you go? Professor Binns teaches his own _class_ , but you're hardly welcome to listen in on one? You're still technically a student, you fume. Don't you have as much right to learn magic as you ever did? Weren't you studying here, alive and well, just months ago?

Deep down, you know that's the answer. Most ghosts here are centuries-old spectres; no one is left who knew them in life. You are a reminder of tragedies everyone would rather forget.

One by one, the professors take you aside and ask you to leave. Their words are as polite as can be, wrapped in all the necessary niceties, but that ultimately means nothing to you. Stripped of all their justifications, the conclusion becomes clear. You weren't truly wanted here in life, and even less so in death.

The final proof comes from the last person you'd expect.

"Not now, Myrtle," comes Murcia's voice from the other side of the dormitory door. You float through to see that she's not working, but sitting at her bedside table with quills and parchment spread haphazardly around her. A single candle flickers, little more than an oily stump.

"I said, _not now_ ," she snaps, seeing you haven't left. "I have to think … I have to work. You heard what Professor Aphelion said; I failed my astronomy test."

She's been understandably downcast all term, but this is something far more serious. Her voice is purged of any of the life and warmth you once associated with her. That frightens you.

"I can help," you venture, "I'll read off the star chart and test you. It'll be okay."

"No, it won't, Myrtle. You can't keep doing this. It's too difficult for both of us."

A defensive tone creeps into your voice as the candle melts lower. "Doing what, exactly?"

Something snaps; Mercia breaks. "Pretending you're alive! Following me around, going to classes, acting like nothing's changed, like you can just – you can just"

All of a sudden you're in her face, screaming as loudly as she is. "What do you want me to do, then? Go lie in a coffin? Jump out of walls and scare people? Sorry I can't take my head clean off, maybe that would make you happy!"

"Just _go away!_ That's what you can do! For one day, just let me live my life again!"

You laugh shrilly, disbelievingly. "'Live your life?' Oh, that's right, I forgot; _you're_ the one who's dead, aren't you? Why don't you tell me what that's like; I can't imagine!"

"Fine! I can't sleep, I can't work, I can't do _anything_ but think of the fact that you're dead, you're fucking _dead_ " – she can barely speak for sobbing – "and I see you all the time and think that if I hadn't left you alone that night you wouldn't be like this. I think that every damn day, and I _can't do it anymore,_ I can't."

You fly to the other side of the room, unable to speak. Nothing you can say – nothing anyone can say – could alleviate the terrible truth of her words, or the pain they bring you.

"I don't want to see you again, Myrtle," she mumbles, every word choked with regret. "Goodbye."

She gets up, leaves the room, and slams the door hard. The dwindling candlelight flickers out for good. Left alone in Murcia's wake, you plunge through the wall, into the pipes, and let the blast of sewage water carry you where it will.

* * *

You are thirteen years old when you should have turned fourteen, and still thirteen years old when you realize it's been exactly one year since you stopped aging.

That entire day is spent in the sewers. Emerging the morning after, you find a sprig of flowers lying in the sink across from your usual stall. You leave them to wither with a cruel satisfaction. If Murcia really wanted to say something, she should have showed her face.

* * *

You are thirteen years old (fifteen, actually, but it hardly matters when you haven't had a birthday party in two years) when the castle erupts in celebration. The war tearing apart both worlds, magical and muggle, has ended. It means very little to you when those worlds are no longer yours. In a vain effort to feel _something_ , you retreat away from the cheering and the noise and stare out at the fireworks from the tallest tower. Perhaps mum and dad are celebrating under the same enraptured sky. Or perhaps it means very little to them, either.

* * *

You are thirteen years old (sixteen, you remind yourself) and it isn't until you watch the fleet of graduating students fade into the sunset on the lake that you realize Murcia was among them. You haven't spoken to her in three years. You suppose you never will again.

* * *

You are thirteen years old (and you should be seventeen, because this should be your moment as well, damn it, it was _meant_ to be yours) and Olive Hornby signs her name in the yearbook with a flourish, receives the neatly-rolled scroll and bouquet of clipped flitterblooms, and joins all but one of her year in the little boats which take them back the way they first came. You follow, scarcely visible in the blinding sunlight, because what else can you do? You couldn't write your N.E.W.T.s even if your preteen mind could master the theory of seventh-year magic. Insubstantial hands can't wave a wand or pick up a quill. As Professor Dippet told you countless times before you gave up asking, "I'm so terribly sorry, Miss Warren, but the answer is no." Countless Wizarding laws forbid you from going anywhere near your parents. So what else is left for you, other than robbing Olive Hornby of the life she robbed from you?

The first night she spends on her own, in a tiny apartment in Diagon Alley, you wake her from a deep sleep by bursting through the wall and wailing. She doesn't have time to lunge for her wand before you've vanished again, a cackle lingering in your wake. Nor does she the second time, nor the third, nor the fourth. The forty-sixth time you materialize out of thin air – as she's trying to impress an experienced wandmaker with an open apprenticeship, no less – she whirls about and sends a leg-locking curse through your heart. It has no effect, of course, and you both know it, but you melt back into the floor regardless. The jinx isn't the only thing without a lasting impact.

* * *

You are thirteen years old (twenty-eight, really, or is it twenty-seven?) when you realize what you've been trying to deny for about a decade – scaring Olive Hornby no longer brings you any joy. (Perhaps it never really has, mutters a guilty little voice). Desperate to prove yourself wrong, you glimpse at her mail over her shoulder, peek through the letter-box, listen in on telephone calls, until the opportunity presents itself. There it is, scrawled in fussy cursive on the pastel-white card, the perfect chance at revenge. "You, Olive Hornby, are cordially invited to the wedding of Cyril Hornby and Patricia Huddleston, May 17th, 1958, St. Andrew's Parish." This will be worth it. This will make up for it all.

You swoop in through the stained glass window, shrieking and howling and moaning, just as the couple are about to kiss; you surge between Olive's brother and his muggle bride, who shrieks and stumbles into the flower girl, upsetting the bouquet. The shocked Mrs. Huddleston promptly faints, her husband bellows, and Olive, eyes alight with fire, comes tearing up the aisle, whipping her wand out of the sleeve of her bridesmaid's gown and firing curses left and right. You laugh louder to drown out everything, the yelling and sobbing and explosions and the fact that you still feel absolutely _nothing._

Deep down you knew that there would be consequences, and they come in the form of a magically-enforced restraining order and a Ministry cover-up of the chaos. Memory charms are cast, the wedding is repeated and carried out smoothly, and you are required to return to Hogwarts indefinitely. You plead with the judge – there's still so much of the world you haven't seen; you don't know why you wasted so much time harassing Olive (she wasn't worth it, anyway); more than anything, you just can't go back _there_ , not to where it happened. Nobody listens. You're hardly surprised. You gain a new appreciation for the phrase 'silent as the grave.'

* * *

You are thirteen years old (twenty-nine, then thirty, then older), and to the new generation of students at Hogwarts School, you're not a lost friend, a murdered classmate, or even a name on a plaque. You're merely one of the castle's many enchanting features, no different than a moving suit of armor, a talking picture, one of the ancient ghosts who sing about their long-ago decapitations to entertain first-years. That you once walked these halls yourself, studied in these desks, slept in this bed, doesn't occur to most of them.

An eleven-year-old boy in red and gold comes up to you in the corridor and wants to know if he can ask you something. Taken off-guard, you aren't sure how to respond. He's spoken to his house ghost, he says, and he has a very serious question about the nature of the afterlife. He glances back at his friends, egging him on from the bend in the hallway, and his face strains with the effort not to laugh. "We – uh – we wanted to know if your head can come all the way off, like his." Their laughter rings in your ears even after you've sunk through the floor.

You're not sure what exactly starts the name-calling. Maybe someone overheard you crying while you hovered your old bed in the Ravenclaw girl's dormitory, watched the waving figure of Murcia in the graduation class photo of 1947, or floated staring at your favorite library book that, even after all these years, still won't open to ghostly fingers. Of course, you're no stranger to mockery, but that's small consolation, especially when they've decided on something as banal as 'Moaning Myrtle.' The first time you hear it, you fly screaming at the smirking sixth-year, wanting to chase him into the black lake, to make him wonder for just a moment what it would be like to die at thirteen and watch your friends and family and even enemies grow up and move on. Confrontation, however, only makes you more of a laughingstock. Unlike nearly every other bloody fad that's swept this school, the name catches on, until a chorus of _ugly, miserable, moping, moaning Myrtle_ drives you back to your toilet for good. The old bathroom, which has never had much of a draw for Hogwarts students in the best of times, quickly becomes all but deserted.

* * *

You are thirteen years old (forty, or forty-five, but what does it matter how long you've been dead when you're still stuck in that age when one feels so _alive_?) and it starts to become sharply apparent to you that you've never felt love. Parental, of course, and when you're feeling charitable you might even say friendship, but not the kind your pubescent mind tells you that you need. Not the kind that blazes and growls and drives you wild with frustration that your body is no more than memory and smoke. A lonely journey through the plumbing one night delivers you to a bathroom you've never seen before, but which you come back to frequent more often than is probably appropriate. You spy on prefects from your vantage points in spouts and toilets, drinking in the muscled limbs, glistening bodies, and tousled hair, relishing this cheap imitation of the love you will never know. It comes with the risk of accidentally drifting into view and enduring the inevitable 'moaning' Myrtle jokes, or suffering the even greater insult of being flushed into the lake (horrible black, filthy water, and large lurking shapes that remind you too much of something you'd rather forget) but it's worth it.

You're always careful to keep your eyes shut when the bathers are entering and exiting the water – you still have some sense of decency, you remind yourself – but these encounters are permeated with shame regardless. Is it wrong, you wonder, a middle-aged woman with the mind and body of a teenager ogling these boys? Of course it is. Everything is wrong about this situation. Everything's always been wrong. That doesn't stop you. Eventually the guilt fades away, as so much in your life already has.

* * *

You are thirteen years old (fifty-nine, and that's still too young to hear what you are about to) when Dumbledore brings the news. It was old age, he explains, that and some disease whose overlong name you forget the moment after you hear it. Dad went first, Mum a week later. The dear old Gandalf of so long ago stands solemnly and tells the victims' murdered child of the death you wish you'd been lucky enough to have.

It doesn't hit you until later, the magnitude of how utterly and completely alone you are. They can move on to their reward. You can't. This is what you have chosen. _You are never going to see them again._

You don't come out of the sewer for a year.

* * *

 **A/N:** **Thank you for reading another chapter of this! I hope that you enjoyed it, depressing as it is.**

 **I chose a hazel-and-unicorn-hair wand for Myrtle because Pottermore states that they will wilt and 'die' upon the deaths of their owners, which was a touch I just had to add to the story.**

 **I felt bad being so horrible to poor Hagrid in this, but it couldn't be helped; as far as Myrtle and Murcia know, he's responsible for her death, so there was no other way I could portray him in their eyes but negatively.**

 **The Hogwarts graduation ceremony, in which the seventh-years ride back across the lake on the same boats which took them to Hogwarts in their first year, is something J.K. Rowling confirmed on Pottermore. However, I made up the yearbook, certificates and flitterboom bouquets.**

 **The scene where Myrtle disrupts Olive's brother's wedding is based off of something she briefly alludes to during the bathroom scene in Goblet of Fire. I decided to have the brother marry a muggle so that Myrtle's appearance would cause enough of a scene to call in the Ministry, and also to suggest that perhaps Olive has moved on from her narrow-minded ways as she grew up.**

 **Reviews and faves are always appreciated! :)**


	3. Afterlife

You are thirteen years old (sixty-three, and the number jumps out at you because it's been fifty years) when it happens again.

You hadn't wanted to go to Sir Nicholas' deathday party, and for the most part, the other ghosts respected that. Such a celebration was for the older spirits, the long-dead who'd spun their lamentable ends into legend. No one expected a relatively recent murder victim, a child no less, to find any meaning in the macabre festivity. Nonetheless, the Gryffindor ghost had wanted a full turnout so badly that the Fat Friar had persuaded you, in the gentlest manner possible – "But surely you'd be _happier_ with company, wouldn't you?" – to attend. You'd agreed, more to break up the monotony than anything else.

You should have known better, of course. No sooner have you arrived than Peeves the Poltergeist pops up, oh-so-kindly informing you how a couple of second-years have been snickering behind your back. It seems to have been that Harry Potter boy, the one who apparently vanquished a dark wizard years back, and a couple of his friends. The girl half-heartedly denies having said anything rude, but you've heard this excuse countless times. Peeves seizes the chance to add his own insult – _spotty,_ of all bloody things, as if it's your fault you died as an acne-ridden teenager – and drives you out of the room. You return to your bathroom and plunge into the sewers, hoping for the fetid water to crush the air out of your lungs, before remembering that, of course, you are already dead.

If you'd been paying any attention, perhaps you would have noticed the creaking of ancient doors, the sound of something thick and heavy moving over damp stones, the whispered snakelike language you've heard once before. But just like that day half a century ago, you don't notice until it's too late.

The trio of students from the deathday party turn up unexpectedly the next evening, wanting to know if you've seen "anything funny lately." You can't tell them anything they want to hear, but their intention becomes clear soon enough, relayed by one of your fellow ghosts. The Heir of Slytherin has returned to Hogwarts. The Chamber of Secrets has been opened.

All at once, what little you knew about your death has been proven a lie. If you're honest with yourself, you never gave much thought as to whether or not the Hagrid boy was responsible; you just trusted the judgment of the teachers. Now you're forced to acknowledge that, apart from the hissing voice – which you highly doubt you'd be able to recognize speaking normal English – you have no real clues about identity of your murderer, nor his monster. If Rubeus Hagrid truly was the Heir of Slytherin, why is the Chamber only being reopened now, when he has been living on the grounds for fifty years? And what is the monster, if not his beastly spider? It weighs like a block of ice in your stomach, the realization that after all these years, you still don't know how or why you died.

As usual, the school has bigger problems to worry about than your predicament. You can't blame them. Little more than a week after the writing appears on the wall, a Gryffindor first-year is found petrified. Not long after, Harry Potter's trio starts brewing up Polyjuice Potion in your bathroom; from what you overhear, it's part of some convoluted scheme to track down the culprit behind these attacks. You couldn't care less about their project – if all the staff in the school couldn't find the Heir before, how can three second-years hope to now? – but you have to admit that the presence of three living students in your lonely world is a bit of a comfort. It's disheartening, too. Listening to their friendly conversations, watching the girl's fingers dexterously chop and slice potion ingredients just so, you're more acutely aware of the life you lost than you have been in decades.

The attacks continue through the winter, claiming a Hufflepuff boy and Sir Nicholas himself. The trio abandon the bathroom after a disastrous episode with the Polyjuice Potion, leaving you alone with your thoughts. Sometime in late January, someone is insensitive enough to throw a book through the top of your head as you sit mulling over your death in the U-bend. Harry Potter recovers it with a great deal more fascination than the small black object seems to be worth. Spring brings with it another round of petrifications, this time Harry's female friend and a prefect from your own house. Hagrid is carted off to Azkaban, and even Headmaster Dumbledore disappears. In a grim repetition of years past, dread pervades the very atmosphere of the school. There are talks of Hogwarts being shut down.

Where will you go, you find yourself wondering, if the school closes? Ministry decree forbids you from leaving, after all. Will they repeal the law they enacted so many years ago? Do any of the living even remember it? Perhaps, if they let you go and turn a blind eye to the Statute of Secrecy, you could haunt your old house in London. You find yourself disliking the idea, though. Cutting yourself off from magic, immersing yourself entirely in mundanity, holds no appeal. It would be different were your parents still alive, but now there's nothing for you there. What's more, without the constant reminder that you live in a world where lingering on after death is possible, you fear you might forget yourself entirely. On the other hand, the idea of remaining forever in the abandoned castle is perhaps even worse.

Finally, one night, the words you've been fearing ring throughout the school. The deputy headmistress' magically magnified voice is taut and grave. "All students return to their house dormitories at once. All teachers return to the staff room. Immediately, please."

It seems not all of them obey, for shortly afterwards, your door creaks open to admit three figures. There's a queasy-looking man who you assume to be a teacher, Potter's redheaded friend, and the Boy Who Lived himself. Barely looking up from the cistern where you sit, you ask them what they want this time.

"To ask you how you died."

The past fifty years vanish. You are thirteen, really and truly thirteen, again, staring down at what was once Myrtle Warren. Olive Hornby is shrieking and scrambling out the door where the cowed teacher will one day stand; the staff are bending low over your body while Dumbledore stands and sears through you with that disappointed stare; Murcia is sobbing, face contorted in guilt and pain as she tells you to "Just _go away_ , Myrtle!" No longer are these memories yours alone to bear. You spin your tale like a giddy schoolgirl (which perhaps you still are), savouring the fact that another person, for reasons you cannot surmise, wants to share in the most important moment of your existence; to relive the thirteenth of June, 1943. Certainly this, you think, is the reason why Sir Nicholas so relished his Deathday party. After all, with the acknowledgement that you died comes the rare recognition that you once lived.

Harry shows interest in your mention of the yellow eyes. Where exactly did you see them, he wants to know. Not remembering their precise location as clearly as what happened afterwards, you assume it must have been the sink across from the last stall you used. The two boys converge on it, fussing with the tap you know all too well has never worked. Then Harry opens his mouth, and you recognize the ominous hissing; a different voice, but unmistakeably the same language.

With a groan of time-wearied stones, the sink descends into the floor. The yawning mouth of a tunnel opens beyond. So this is how it happened, you realize with a rush of unidentifiable emotion; this was the entrance to the Chamber all along.

Before you're aware of what they're doing, the professor drops down into the pipe, followed by the boys. Hours later, they emerge, bedraggled and blood-soaked but alive, clutching the tail feathers of a bird and dragging a crying young girl in tow. In that moment, without them saying a word, you know that it's over; whatever slew you lies dead. It seems so much and yet so little.

You can't do much more than stare at the boy whom you're sure has avenged you, both grateful and terribly jealous. What do you say at such a moment? Should you thank him? Praise him? Ask him how he survived and you did not? All you come up with is that, had he died, he'd have been welcome to share your toilet. To be fair, it's not a lie.

The school erupts in jubilation; belated, perhaps, from the last time the Chamber was opened. Like then, the petrified victims are recovered; unlike then, there is no cause to dampen this celebration. Dumbledore is returned to his post, Hagrid is cleared of all charges, and the entrance to the Chamber is resealed. Still, you feel you must see something for yourself before sharing in the sense of victory.

After ensuring the hallway outside your bathroom is deserted – you want to be completely alone for this – you let yourself sink through the floor, down, down, through rock and dirt and time, until you reach the Chamber. A chill goes through your body, or you expect it would, if you could still differentiate between heat and cold. The great serpent is strewn across the floor in a massive murky-green coil, mouth agape from its dying agony. Its bulbous yellow eyes have been replaced by bloody sockets. Towering above the carcass, a statue of a hard-faced man glares down at you. Salazar Slytherin.

You stare his likeness in the soulless stone eyes and tell him he's lost. His monster is dead and his legacy of hatred over. He hasn't been able to stop muggle-borns from attending Hogwarts. Yet the words sound small and hollow, even disregarding the frailty of your voice or the vastness of the Chamber. Saying that Slytherin has lost seems to carry with it the implication that you've won. You know, crying alone miles beneath the school, that you haven't.

* * *

You are thirteen years old (sixty-five), and while Harry Potter has forgotten about you, you have not done the same to him. He doesn't return to your lavatory, but you encounter him again, one night, in the prefect's bathroom. Like the reopening of the Chamber of Secrets two years ago, the Triwizard Tournament is such a popular topic among the denizens of Hogwarts that even you are aware of the details – how, though underage and underqualified, the Potter boy somehow found himself the paradoxical fourth contestant in the three-person competition. You've already watched the other Hogwarts champion, the dreamy Cedric Diggory, puzzle over his golden egg (and you've watched him more than _that_ , you remind yourself with not enough shame) but you couldn't muster up the courage to actually come out and talk to him, as much as you'd wanted to. The same is not true when Harry Potter arrives with his own clue.

After watching him fiddle with the egg for a while (a bit silly, really, not to think of putting it _in_ the water), you take pity on him and pop out of the drain. He's suitably alarmed, which you can't blame him for, though you do remind him how he hasn't come to visit you in ages.

Harry is slow in unravelling the clue, sticking the egg underwater without submerging himself to listen to it and puzzling over what sort of creatures could possibly sing underwater. A childish part of you, so light and carefree you almost forgot it existed, appreciates how long he's staying. You giggle, you tease, you poke him in the right direction without giving away the answer. It's a disappointment when he finally realizes what's waiting for him in the second task – curse that stupid mermaid picture on the wall, making things far too obvious – and asks you how he's supposed to breathe in the lake.

His gall in saying this to a person who hasn't breathed in decades stings, but it also opens a window. Just like the last time the two of you met, you recognize the opportunity to share some of your story. Two years ago you told him how you died; now you'll reveal what happened afterwards. Your words fly out as quickly as the memories flash through your mind – Olive's shock at finding your body, all the time you spent haunting her, the debacle at her brother's wedding – and you've gotten to the Ministry's restraining order before you realize Harry's not listening.

You haven't given up on him, though, so on the day of the second task you brave the murky lake and its denizens to help Harry out. He's just finished repulsing a couple of Grindylows back into the weeds when you come across him. Surprised, he tries to shout your name but issues nothing but bubbles. Once again, you're filled with something that could almost be described as happiness. It's the closest thing you've felt to warmth since you died, and as you point Harry in the right direction, not even the chill of the water can dim it.

The next time you're spying on the prefects, you overhear them wondering how on earth someone as young as Harry Potter won second place in the lake task. You smile, flushed with another long-disused emotion. Pride.

* * *

You are thirteen years old (still sixty-five) and the Triwizard Tournament, just months ago the foremost topic on Hogwarts' collective mindset, is all but forgotten. A new phrase dominates conversation throughout the castle. You hear it on the lips of students, teachers, ghosts, house-elves, paintings; anyone and anything within earshot of your bathroom and its network of pipes. _He Who Must Not Be Named. You Know Who._ And, very occasionally, usually followed by the horrified sputters and shushing of all in the vicinity – _Voldemort._

The name isn't unfamiliar to you, but it doesn't evoke the same sense of dread that seems to hold the entire school captive. Perhaps it's because you spent the entirety of his first reign of terror the same way you have the majority of your afterlife, sulking in a toilet. Or perhaps it's because you've already witnessed your share of evil in the world. You remember Grindelwald and Hitler and the Blitz; you've seen the Chamber of Secrets opened twice and … well, not _lived_ to tell the tale, you think bitterly, but you're still around all the same. You've lost everything you possibly could; what more can this so-called Dark Lord do to you?

One thing manages to hold your attention, though. This Voldemort has killed a student, one of the few you knew by name – Cedric Diggory. The Fat Friar was considerate enough to warn you in advance about the memorial feasts, weeping students, and general somber atmosphere, lest they bring back unpleasant memories. The mourning itself isn't so distressing to you – living in the sewers makes it easy to avoid anything you don't want to witness – as the news of the boy's death.

It disgusts you that a student has been murdered in Hogwarts for the first time in fifty-two years, and you of all people knew next to nothing about him. From what you can glean from the Friar and conversations overheard in the Prefects' bathroom, Cedric earned quite the tributes from his bereaved peers. People spoke glowingly of his bravery, his kindness and his loyalty. You know all too well the desire to be memorialized after death, the pain of not being so, and all you can say about the boy was how good he looked in the bath. The appeal of your voyeuristic rendezvouses drops sharply; within a few months they've stopped altogether.

It disgusts you, too, that your first reaction upon hearing Diggory was dead was to hope, foolishly, selfishly, that you wouldn't have to be alone any longer. That someone else had chosen to stay.

One night you follow the pipes up to the secluded turret where, until now, your name was the most recent upon the plaque of deceased students. The memorial has rarely crossed your mind in the intervening years, not since your class graduated and the occasional flowers left by it withered away, and you suspect the same is true for nearly everybody else. It's a bit of a shock, therefore, to see it polished and shimmering in the moonlight now, bedecked with bouquets. You're not sure how that makes you feel. You're not quite selfish enough to begrudge the boy his tributes, but neither do you have it in you not to feel a twinge of jealousy.

Lost in thought, bobbing in mid-air beside the memorial, you don't notice the silver-bearded figure until he's next to it as well. Nor do you notice he's crying until he produces a handkerchief to dab at his eyes.

"I didn't mean to disturb you, Miss Warren," the headmaster murmurs. "It seems that we are both of the same mind tonight."

You say nothing. You've always thought of Dumbledore as knowing what a student was thinking without having to hear it, anyway.

"Forgive me," he says. His eyes are fixed on the memorial, not you, but you feel the words are addressed to you as well as Cedric. "I've always considered my foremost role to be the protection of my students. I have failed them twice now."

Not exactly able to contradict him, you remain silent.

A seemingly-interminable amount of time passes while the two of you linger there, the old man and the ghost, weighed down by past and present alike.

Finally, averting his gaze from the plaques, he speaks to you directly. "I've kept this from you for long enough, Miss Warren. Just as the world deserves to know the truth of how Cedric Diggory died, you deserve the truth of what happened to you."

"The truth?" You're perplexed, though it reoccurs to you just now that, with Hagrid having been declared innocent, you never found who or what killed you.

Dumbledore sighs. "Two students of Hogwarts have lost their lives during my time as headmaster. Both of them were murdered by Lord Voldemort. You would have known him as Tom Riddle."

From far away, through the recesses of time and memory, that snakelike voice reaches out for you. You see yourself falling, falling backwards upon the floor. A figure watches nearby, faceless no more.

"Tom Riddle?" You're in two places at once, speaking to Dumbledore in the present and staring down at your body in the past. "But he – I thought he was the one who"–

"You thought what we all believed – what he wanted us to." Dumbledore's mouth is set in a grim line. "He framed Hagrid because he knew few people would jump to the defence of a half-giant. I alone believed in his innocence, but it was not enough. I blame myself; I should have seen through Riddle's deception from the beginning. Voldemort has always exploited the hatred of those who are born different."

"Is that why he killed me, then?" you demand to know. "Because I'm – or I was-"

"Muggle-born? Possibly. You understand, of course, the Heir's intentions in opening the Chamber. But I believe it is more likely that you were targeted, as was his last victim, simply for being … forgive me … at the wrong place at the wrong time. Voldemort considers himself entitled to take lives for any number of reasons, many of them wholly trivial."

This is too much, too quickly. You always considered your death a mere dot on the pages of wizarding history, a blot of ink dropped from a quill by a careless hand. Now it's written into a greater narrative, a legacy of evil. You've joined a host of countless others, each of their deaths inconsequential on its own, but together part of something wider, more terrible and more overwhelming than you can possibly bear. You're not sure which is worse, being the sole victim of an unknown or one of thousands cut down by a monster.

It shouldn't matter, you try to rationalize with yourself; 'better' or 'worse' should make no difference when you're dead anyway. Yet somehow it does. Your death is sharper, now, weightier, darker. Unavenged.

"I have reason to suspect," Dumbledore continues, cautiously, "that your death held particular significance for Lord Voldemort. If I am not mistaken, you were his first victim. All of us make certain choices which determine the courses our fates will take. The choice he made that day was a … particularly pivotal one along his path to evil."

He breaks eye contact too quickly, as if he's speaking about more than he lets on, and the dark shadow of suspicion passes through your mind.

"Why didn't you tell me this before?" you ask, more accusatorily than you would have to a professor in life. "Didn't I have the right to know?"

Even deeper remorse tugs at the lines on his face. This is no longer the Gandalf, the Merlin, promising to whisk you away to a land of magic as a child. For the first time, you see Albus Dumbledore fully for what he is: an old man, weary and broken. Someone who belongs among cobwebs and dust and faded glass. He's someone like you, and you cannot find it in your heart to blame him.

"It seemed kinder," he admits, "to spare you the truth. It is often easy to conceal hard realities from those who we deem unready for them, whether they really are or not."

He's gazing neither at you nor the plaques, but off into the distance. Again, you have the impression that he's referring to something greater than his words reveal.

"For all this, Myrtle, I am truly sorry."

With another sigh, he turns towards the doorway.

"Professor, wait" – He'll be gone soon, and you just have to ask – "Cedric didn't – I mean, he isn't going to"–

Dumbledore turns back, his face awash with the same disappointment he wore when he first saw you in spirit form, and you finally understand it.

"No, I'm afraid. He has moved on. As I said, all of us make choices which shape our fate, whether for the better or for the worse. Goodnight, Miss Warren."

That's it, then; you are, as you have been for so long, still alone. You do not see Harry Potter at all this year, and slowly, slowly, the need for his companionship, or Cedric's, passes away. Much like how you stopped needing Murcia, or she stopped needing you.

* * *

You are thirteen years old (sixty-seven) when you get a new visitor.

That's not the right term, because he doesn't come to visit you; nor, in fact, do you go to visit him. Rather, one day in a series of innumerable monotonous weeks is livened by a snatch of crying on your usual trek through the pipes. It's the unmistakeable sound of a young person in distress, and you know, at the very core of who you are, that you cannot ignore it.

You weave through a maze of plumbing, the noises growing in volume until you're deposited abruptly in a toilet. Looking around, you're greeted by a vaguely familiar bathroom: smaller than yours, not as dingy, probably the boys' on the sixth floor. More importantly, it's occupied. A tall young man in Slytherin green, probably three or four years older than you were when you died, stands over the sink with his back to you. It's trembling.

Scrutinizing him in the mirror, you're struck with concern. The boy's face is a shade of white even paler than his smoothly-combed hair. Telltale tear tracks run from his eyes down to his chin. In between repressed, wheezing sobs, he lurches forwards and gags loudly into the sink, though nothing comes out.

"You're dry heaving."

Starting in shock, the boy whips around. You dart back into the stall at the sight of his wand pointed into your chest, despite how little threat he poses.

It's a few moments before either of you dares to say anything. Finally the boy speaks, his voice curt but unsteady.

"Who the hell's there?"

"I am." Shyly, you phase yourself through the stall door, still eyeing his wand. "You can put that away. I won't hurt you. I'm-"

"Yeah, yeah, I know." Not relaxing his posture in the slightest, he pockets his wand and turns back to the sink. "Moaning Myrtle."

"Just 'Myrtle' will do fine," you say, "and you're not all right. You're dry-heaving."

"Brilliant observation," the boy snaps shakily. "Now piss off."

"What's wrong?" Usually, rudeness of this sort would send you howling back into the toilets, but you can't find it in your heart to leave him. Brusque as he is, his clear desperation calls to you. After all, you have a lot of experience with crying in bathrooms. "Please, let me help you."

He gives a short, huffy laugh which quickly morphs into another retching sound. "You, help me? There's nothing you can do. There's nothing anyone can do. Just go…"

"Are you being bullied? Is someone making fun of you?"

No answer; just more gagging and gasping.

"Please, just try to breathe. I've been through this a lot." Memories reach out across the years: your mother's calming presence after a bout of unintentional magic left your young self confused and exhausted; Murcia by your side one particularly stressful night in the Ravenclaw common room. "Nice, long breaths, in and out. You can do it."

The spluttering sounds continue. Certain he's not listening, you're about to speak up again when he gives a deep exhale.

"That's perfect." You dare to float a bit closer. The boy's hands are clenched around the lip of the sink, knuckles like balls of ice. "Keep going."

In and out, in and out, in and out. You count the minutes. He's not anywhere near being in good shape, but the dry-heaving is gradually fading in favor of hesitant sobs.

"It's okay to cry," you say gently. "You don't have to be ashamed."

Another disbelieving laugh. He still isn't saying anything, though.

"I'm serious. It's not a bad thing, letting your feelings out. In fact, it's a very good thing. If I hadn't heard you crying, I couldn't have come to help you."

"Like I said," he mutters, "I don't need your help. I _can't_ be helped."

You humph. "Even though you just were?"

"Look … why do you care, anyway?"

It's an easy answer. "Because I know what it's like."

He turns around at this, looking you directly in the eyes. His are tired and bloodshot, but not as wet as before.

"You don't know anything about me," he answers firmly, " _anything._ But, for what it's worth … thank you. I guess. Now, don't tell anyone you saw this."

"Wait!" you cry as he turns towards the door. "You can't just leave! There's … er, still something I need to tell you."

"What?" He glances back skeptically.

"Uh, make sure you drink lots of water. It helps, after things like this. And get a lot of rest, too. You might even want to go to the Hospital Wing. And…"

"Yeah?"

It's not that you have anything else in mind to tell him, but that you can't just let him leave, not after a moment like this. You've found that there's something precious, almost sacred, in seeing someone at their most vulnerable and pulling them back from the brink.

"…And come back some time?" you finish hopefully.

He sighs, but there's a dash of a smile buried in it. "Maybe. If you keep this a secret."

"I swear." When he's practically out the door, you realize you've forgotten something. "Oh, and what's your name?"

"Draco," he responds, before rounding the corner and disappearing.

The pipes connecting your lavatory to that on the sixth floor become a well-known route. Draco doesn't reappear for weeks, but that can't quell your hopes. One afternoon as you rise out of the toilet, your mood spikes at the sight of someone standing by the mirror – only to droop again as you recognize the figure. Two figures, in fact, one of whom you would have been overjoyed to see two years ago. It's Harry Potter and his friend.

"Who were you expecting?" asks the latter when you vocalize your disappointment. He doesn't even bother looking back at you.

"Nobody," you say, deciding to lay on the guilt thick. "He said he'd come back and see me, but then _you_ said you'd pop in and visit me, too … and I haven't seen you for months and months. I've learned not to expect too much from boys."

It's not entirely true, though; while you must have known, deep down, that Harry never cared, Draco was different. You had so much in common. The connection you felt, that bond between two outcasts with nowhere else to turn, can't have been unreciprocated. It must be that the bathroom is too busy; Draco got lucky in finding it deserted once, but he can't risk being seen again. You'll have to remember to invite him to your own bathroom the next time you see him. As for now, maybe if the two boys leave … you find yourself glancing expectantly at the door, already ahead of yourself.

Potter's friend wears an expression you've seen far too many times before. "When you say you had lots in common, d'you mean he lives in an S-bend, too?"

"No!" Your temper flares; you're sure you'd feel the blood pounding in your head if it still flowed. You'll stand up for Draco like you wish someone had stood up for you. "I mean he's sensitive, people bully him, too, and he feels lonely and hasn't got anybody to talk to, and he's not afraid to show his feelings and cry!"

You've said too much; Harry asks at once for the details.

"Never you mind!" This is all wrong; he shouldn't be asking, his friend shouldn't be smirking like that, and you shouldn't be tearing up, not at a time like this. "I promised I wouldn't tell anyone and I'll take his secret to the-"

"Not the grave, surely?" sneers the redhead. "The sewers, maybe…"

You've reached your breaking point. Letting out a scream of fury, you swoop back into the toilet bowl, hoping both boys were drenched by the spray left in your wake. You're sorely tempted to cede all control to the current, let the water drag you all the way down to the lake as it's done so many times before. The only thing giving you strength is the thought that for once in your existence, you're actually _needed_. You can't abandon Draco.

Another week passes before you see him again, hunched over the sink in the same bathroom and shivering violently. His once-slicked hair is now tousled; his cloak has been thrown off and his tie hangs loosely. Despite your coaxing, he still won't tell you what's wrong.

"Are they beating you?" you venture tentatively, bobbing a little closer. It doesn't seem like he has any physical wounds, merely deep bags under his eyes. "Are they spreading rumors? Are they calling you names? You know" – the words flow without hesitation, just like when you told Harry of your death and its aftermath, because some things just _so need to be told_ –"I've never told anyone about this before, but someone called me something dreadful right before I died. Do you want to hear it? She called me Mudblood."

Finally a response, but perhaps not the one you'd hoped for – Draco twitches slightly, looking over his shoulder, his face an unreadable mess of emotion. Is that disgust in his eyes? For Olive, or for…? No, certainly _Draco_ would never think that, even if he is a Slytherin …

"Are you one, then? A – er, a Muggleborn?"

The way he stumbles over the word tells you it's not his preferred term.

"Yes." Your voice comes out uncomfortably high and fake. "So, you see … er, we've got a lot in common, like I've said, me being Muggleborn and you being … well …" A horrible scene emerges in your memory: Olive on the ground, hugging her knees and crying … have you wasted your sympathy on another bully, caught this boy in an action that belies his true nature?

Then another, even more impossible thought: does it matter?

As quickly as he'd turned around, Draco snaps back into his usual position. He releases a long, shuddering breath. "Whatever. I don't care about – well, it's got nothing to do with this. Just leave, please. You're wasting your time."

But you're not. You've learned something about him just now, but even more about yourself. Maybe Draco isn't the young girl crying in the bathroom. Maybe he's Olive Hornby, the tormentor become the victim. And maybe there's something in you, something gentle and beautiful that you'd thought would have been long-dead by now, that wants to help him regardless.

You only wish that he would let you. As Draco's appearances become more frequent over the next two months, so too does his face become more haggard, his frame gaunter. On the worst days he can't even speak for crying. The most you can glean is that he's being forced into something profoundly terrifying. Whoever's behind this – and they must be a true monster, not like Olive, not like Draco himself – is very lucky he won't say their name, because oh, _how_ you'd make them suffer if you could. The helplessness is unbearable. Talking can only do so much; you can't rub your hand over his back in slow, soothing circles as you'd like to, or hug his shoulders until they still. It strikes you, with no small amount of discomfort, that perhaps this is how Murcia felt.

It's spring by now, and time and stress seem to be wearing down Draco's walls. One evening they're on the verge of breaking. The truth is so very, tantalizingly close now that you need all your willpower to keep your voice smooth and calm.

"Tell me what's wrong … I can help you …"

"I can't do it," he gasps, "I can't … it won't work … and unless I do it soon … he says he'll kill me."

 _Who will?_ You can feel yourself and Draco teetering on the edge of a precipice, nearly ready to fall.

He swallows, looks up from the sink he's been crying into, and notices something in the mirror.

Before you understand what's happening, a red jet of light blazes through the air and blows a lamp on the far wall into fragments. Draco is on his feet, outstretched wand still glowing from the attack, and across the bathroom Harry Potter has drawn his weapon as well. He flicks it, but Draco counters with lightning reflexes and readies another assault.

"No! No! Stop it!" you scream. "Stop! _Stop_!"

It's as fruitless as everything you've already done to help Draco. The bathroom erupts into a whirl of frantic movement, lights and explosions as the two boys you've cared for the most hurl curses back and forth. A cistern immediately below you bursts into rubble, deluging the floor with water and blasting stone shards upwards through your form. If you'd been anything more than insubstantial, you'd be riddled with shrapnel. Draco reappears amidst the dust, not a troubled boy but a man warped with anger. He shrieks another curse at Harry – and even you, the Muggle-born dead at thirteen, recognize the enormity of the word _Crucio_ – but is cut off as his opponent shouts something unfamiliar.

For the second time, a youth collapses backwards onto the bathroom floor.

Unlike before, blackness isn't so merciful as to cover the scene before you. Instead of seizing up, drifting away, falling back, you're watching – just _watching_ – as it all unfolds. Last time there was no blood; now it slicks the floor like a fresh coat of paint. Draco twitches pathetically, his chest a mass of scarred red flesh. All at once he is you again, and it's Harry who is Olive, rushing to his enemy's side in horrified disbelief.

You're screaming, and _he's going to die, just like I died,_ and Harry is pleading that he didn't do it, it wasn't his fault, and Olive is doing the same fifty-some years in the past, but somehow all you can hear is her voice, _please, Myrtle, I'm so sorry,_ and you're still screaming, and now the door slams against the wall and the potions professor rushes in, runs to Draco's side, and mutters something you can't hear over your own wailing, and at the same time he's Dumbledore bowing his head in shame, and he ought to because a student's been failed _again_ , and you keep screaming even though the bleeding is slowing and Draco's wounds are healing and the teacher is taking him away, because there's no way he'll come back after this, and whoever is hurting him will go on doing so without your help, and you'll never see him again, just like your parents, just like Murcia…

By the time you and Harry are alone, you realize you're no longer screaming. You're laughing, a deranged, soulless laughter. It's the same sound a madman makes when he's carted away for his crimes, and it terrifies even you. Yet you don't stop, because when you have moaned and cried and screamed until you can no more, what else is there to do but laugh?

* * *

 **A/N: It occurred to me while planning/writing this chapter just how much Myrtle is kept in the dark throughout the series. There's no mention of her ever finding out who and what really killed her and why, let alone that her death was used to create Voldemort's horcrux. Likewise, we never know if she found out the truth about Malfoy, his blood purist ideology, and what he was really getting up to in his sixth year. I decided to settle for a compromise, having Myrtle learn some truths (the fact that she was killed by Voldemort and the Basilisk, Malfoy's condescension towards Muggle-borns) while others (the horcrux, Malfoy's mission to kill Dumbledore) remain hidden from her.**

 **I figured that Myrtle wouldn't mind saying/thinking the word Voldemort. She didn't grow up with knowledge of his regime, so the stigma surrounding his name wouldn't be there, and since she's already dead, she wouldn't have anything to fear from him.**

 **I just may have been inspired to add so much about Cedric by a certain BS plot twist in the Cursed Child. Maybe.**

 **I imagined that, while telling Myrtle the truth about her death, Dumbledore was also thinking about Harry and how he's still keeping him in the dark about the prophecy. In a way, he's doing this not only to enlighten Myrtle, but to prepare himself for when he must tell Harry that "neither can live when the other survives."**

 **Regarding the first scene with Malfoy, I figure that Myrtle would have had a lot of panic attacks and nausea from stress and depression during her school years, and would thus have quite a bit of experience in dealing with them.**

 **I thought long and hard as to whether I should have Malfoy's darker side slip out during his encounters with Myrtle, and eventually decided to go for it, as I think it makes the scene more dynamic and interesting. I also wanted to show that Myrtle is capable of letting go of her anger towards Olive Hornby, as well as finding the empathy to continue helping someone who may not deserve it. This is ultimately Myrtle's story after all, and I wanted to give her the character growth and eventual closure that she never gets in the canon books.**

 **Finally, I needed a reason for why Myrtle is described as sobbing and wailing "with increasing enjoyment" in HBP when the person she's been trying to help was just nearly murdered. I chose to interpret it as her just losing her mind in the stress of the moment, laughing crazily like Sirius did when he was taken off to Azkaban.**


	4. Eternity

You are thirteen years old (nearly sixty-eight) and, even though you haven't slept in decades, you're sure you're dreaming when Draco reappears in your bathroom. Dumbledore has died, a Death Eater sits as Headmaster of Hogwarts, Harry Potter has disappeared and the wizarding world is at war, but it's the same Draco. You catch a flash of his white-blond hair and agitated eyes as he shunts a panting Slytherin fourth-year into one of the cubicles.

"Stay there and be quiet," he hisses through the door. "And don't tell anyone I did this. They won't come in here."

He makes eye contact with you for a fraction of a heartbeat before he's off into the corridor. Minutes after he leaves, hurried footfalls signal the arrival of several newcomers. They grow louder and louder outside your bathroom door before turning a corner and fading away.

Once you're quite sure they won't return, you glide over to the stall from which badly-stifled sobs are issuing. There's a hardened part of you, one which has given away too much sympathy, bared itself too many times, been stabbed too often through the heart, which urges you to leave him alone. Let him cry. It will be better that way than if you had intervened.

Another part of you remembers crying in that very cubicle.

"They're gone," you say wearily. "You don't need to be afraid."

He gives a sharp intake of breath, just as Draco had, and defensively asks who's there. You identify yourself as someone who can help and leave it at that. After a while of coaxing, you piece together that he and a friend were caught skipping Muggle Studies class. His friend was dragged off for detention – which largely consists of the Cruciatus Curse nowadays, so you've heard – but he managed to get away. He can't understand, he keeps saying once he's calmed down, why Malfoy intervened. You can't, either, but you suppose you're grateful for it.

Neither Draco nor the boy return to see you, but two weeks later there's another unexpected arrival – a pair of Hufflepuffs with several copies of _The Quibbler._ They say they've heard talk that your bathroom's a good place to avoid the Carrows' goons, and promptly disappear into the back cubicle. You catch enough snatches of their whispered conversation – "Harry Potter," "Dumbledore's Army," "still fighting You-Know-Who" – to appreciate their need for secrecy and silence. Half an hour later, when a patrol of suspicious prefects comes by, you greet them with an ear-splitting bout of moaning and wailing from the pipes. You've never been so happy to see potential visitors bolt from the scene.

The next time it's a group of Ravenclaws duplicating Anti-Ministry pamphlets, and then a larger crowd with a beat-up old radio tuned into "Potterwatch." By the time your windows glaze over with autumn frost, the visits have increased to two or three per week. Usually the students barely notice your presence, relying on you merely to conceal their presence or drive Carrow supporters away with your namesake rackets. Sometimes one of them will approach you cautiously (Merlin's beard, are you really that frightening?) to ask if you can stand guard. You appreciate being asked. It's an acknowledgement that you're more than just a macabre feature of the room, or some Caterwauling Charm howling whenever an enemy approaches. You're a person, or at least the lingering shadow of one, with the capacity to give and to help. Despite knowing where that led last time, you can't bring yourself to turn them down, not when worse monsters than the basilisk of Slytherin roam the halls.

Even more precious (in a dark, selfish way, you admit) are the ones who come to you specifically for help, the ones who have been hurt like you were. Occasionally the wounds imparted by the Carrows and their ilk are physical; more often, they go deeper than the flesh. You can't give much in the way of advice, but you can at least be a soothing voice, a listening ear, a sympathetic nod – the consolation that they're not alone.

After a while, you insist upon one condition for all of this. They'll call you Myrtle. Miss Warren if they like, or Myrtle Elizabeth if they want to be particularly flattering, but you don't want to hear 'Moaning' ever again.

* * *

You are thirteen years old (just turned sixty-eight) and the once-empty bathroom has become a veritable hotspot of rebellion. Scarcely a day goes by when someone doesn't stop by, even if it's just to calm themselves down after a particularly bigoted Muggle Studies lesson or catch their breath after running from some Carrow lackeys. You know they have other hiding places – many of the older ones keep mentioning a room on the seventh floor – but you're honored, almost overwhelmed, that your dingy toilet is one of them. The sanctuary that became your tomb has opened its arms as a refuge once more.

None of the students speak to you with the same frequency or vulnerability that Draco had, but you come to know their names and faces regardless. The ringleaders of it all are three sixth-years who knew Harry and his companions quite well before their disappearances. There's a boy, Neville, with a kind face usually scarred over from the Carrows' punishments; Ginny, a sister of Potter's redheaded friend, the boldest of the bunch; and Luna, a gentle Ravenclaw with eyes that you think could see through you even if you weren't transparent. She takes the most interest in you out of all of them, asking such probing questions and making statements so unpleasantly true that you fled into your toilet for three days after first hearing one. Yet her sincerity grows on you; there's a frankness and an innocence to her observations that, for once, convinces you that no offense is intended. She's the first person since Harry to hear the story of how you died.

With the trio in charge, you become more involved in their operations against the Death Eater staff. Your familiarity with the school's vast system of pipes and drains comes in handy on multiple occasions. When the trio needs to sneak down to the kitchens to fetch food for students who spent dinner in detention, you clear away a cluster of guards by howling incessantly from the nearest vent. On another night, a quick peek though the grate in Amycus Carrow's office confirms he's safely out of the way of the graffiti being written in the fifth-floor corridor. One day you mimic crying in a different women's bathroom, luring some brutish seventh-years away from their pursuit of a terrified half-blood girl. You get a smug satisfaction from the looks on their faces when they rip open the door, expecting to see their quarry, only to find a spray of water as you plunge back into the toilet.

* * *

You are thirteen years old (sixty-eight, feeling every bit the protective old woman) and this girl they've brought here is _eleven,_ for Merlin's sake, gasping and twitching and bloodied. Luna tells you the whole story as she applies a healing salve. Some bastard sixth-year caught her older sister distributing pro-Muggle pamphlets and decided it wasn't enough to punish her alone.

"They usually stick with _Crucio_ ," Ginny spits, "but this scum wanted to practice his Severing Charm."

You swoop over from your guard post near the door, locking eyes with her.

"Find out what house he is. What he looks like. Which dorm he's in. Everything."

The ages-old restraining order won't let you do to him what you did to Olive Hornby – and he deserves it a hundred, a thousand times more – but your wailing from the pipes beside his room will deny him a good night's sleep as long as he's at Hogwarts. When his beleaguered roommates boot him out into the common room, you follow. However kind you were to Draco, however much your hatred of Olive has dwindled, you haven't forgotten just how cruel you can be to those who deserve it.

* * *

You are thirteen years old (sixty-eight, and so _very_ proud) and the narrow passage between the stalls is full to bursting. Students old and young crowd eagerly around the radio, waiting for the latest news from Potterwatch. You float halfway between them and the door, attentive both to the conversation behind you and the grey corridor ahead. Luna picks herself up from the floor and walks over to you.

"Myrtle?" she ventures, "Can I ask you why you stayed?"

You bristle, instantly understanding her meaning, as she clarifies, "Why you didn't go on? Behind the veil?"

"I don't know," is your eventual response, and it's true. Yet, as you look back over the congregation in the bathroom, it occurs to you that perhaps there's a good reason you did.

* * *

You are thirteen years old (sixty-eight) when Neville Longbottom tells you it has to stop. Luna disappeared months ago, Ginny hasn't returned after Easter, the wounds from his last beating are still fresh, and he's going into hiding. The hidden room on the seventh floor, he says evasively when you press for details. He's sorry, but this needs to stay secret, and the bathroom's just not cutting it anymore.

You laugh wryly, though not unhappily. "This place used to be the emptiest corner of Hogwarts. Now it's too popular for its own good."

Neville takes a moment to see you aren't being passive-aggressive, and then laughs as well. "You've done a great job here, Myrtle. Keep your eyes open. We might need you again."

He waves and leaves, but you don't feel the betrayed emptiness that usually accompanies the sight of a retreating back. Most people who have left you behind have taken something from you – your life, your dignity, your hope. This band of students has given you something. It's what you felt when you helped Harry find the Chamber, when you comforted Draco; it's even what you felt, though you can scarcely remember it, when you studied and learned within these very halls.

They leave you with a purpose.

* * *

You are thirteen years old (sixty-eight), and the time for that purpose has come.

Just like you did long ago in a London air-raid shelter, you think the world must be coming to an end. Hogwarts is ablaze with the kind of action that betrays great fear. Professors mutter protective charms; grim-faced prefects usher students to safety; children who should be joining them clutch their wands in anticipation of the coming fight. Somewhere in the gloom beyond your bathroom's grimy windowpanes, they say an army is gathering, sworn to give their lives for the man who took yours. None of these things holds any surprise for you. What does is the sight of the woman who now stands in the bathroom doorway, sixty-nine but, in your memory, no older than seventeen. Unlike yours, her curly hair has been painted grey with time, but those eyes are as startlingly blue as you remember.

"They told me I could find you here," says Murcia unnecessarily, as if she needed to ask where you'd be.

When you don't say anything, she tries again. "I heard Hogwarts was under attack; I had to come help. The ghosts are planning to help with the defence. Flying through the Death Eaters, confusing them, distracting them, effing them up any way they can. That sort of thing. They – I – thought you might want to help."

"I will." You would have anyway. She didn't need to come to your bathroom just for that, not when any one of the ghosts could have delivered that message. There's another reason she's here.

"Er, great. Thanks." Murcia scuffs at the ground with her heel like the schoolgirl she once was, then gives a wooden laugh. "Funny, isn't it? That it takes a war to drag me back to this place."

Footsteps thunder through the corridor outside; voices are yelling in the distance. She shouldn't linger, yet she does.

"I never came back," she says. You're not sure if it's directed at you or herself. "All those years, and I never came back. Not once."

Her eyes sweep the bathroom, drinking in the filthy mirrors, the peeling paint on the stalls, the tap that's never worked. "I suppose I just wanted to be done with it all. Move on and start the next chapter of my life. No more memories of this place, all the shit that happened here. But I guess" – her voice catches – "I guess that's all you were left with. Wasn't it?"

Still unable to say anything, you nod.

"I'm sorry," she says, finally.

"You don't have to be." Memories of your last encounter come back; the darkened dormitory, both of you screaming, your own pain a black fog blocking out her tears. "I'm the one who should apologize."

Murcia lets out another humorless laugh. "We both messed each other up, then, didn't we? Maybe … how about we just call it even?"

You've spent far too long settling scores. If anyone deserves your malice, it's not Murcia; not even Olive Hornby.

"Of course."

The fraction of a smile – tremulous, grateful – inches across the old woman's face. Somewhere deep in the past, a broken bridge begins to rebuild itself.

Nearby tremors rock the bathroom. It's starting.

"You know it was him, right?" Murcia asks softly. "He-Who – Voldemort? Who did this to you?"

"Yes." That's why you know you've got to help fight. Fifty-five years ago, in this very bathroom, Lord Voldemort killed a thirteen-year-old girl simply for being in his way. He condemned her parents to a comfortable lie, her enemy to years of undeserved torment, and her best friend to a life of guilt. What's past can't be changed, but it must never happen again.

The nervous hope on Murcia's face morphs into grim determination. She grasps her wand, turning resolutely back towards the door. "Then come on, Myrtle. Let's give him hell."

* * *

You are thirteen years old (sixty-eight) but you feel as ageless as you are weightless. An army of ghosts surges back and forth through the advancing intruders like waves across a black lake. As has been the case throughout your afterlife, you're acutely aware of how little you can do. Yet in a battle such as this, mere milliseconds are invaluable. Every moment of discomfort or disorientation you can cause a Death Eater is one in which they might not kill.

Amidst the chaos you hear the familiar sounds of Draco's pleading. Looking around frantically, you catch sight of his pale form backed into a corner by a towering black-robed man. Without hesitation you plunge through the attacker's body, sending chills through flesh. His wand hand falters mid-jab; the next instant, someone's Stunning Spell rockets down the hallway and slams him to the ground. Then there's another scream, further along, and you can't spare a second to wait and see if Draco noticed it was you.

Countless people fall around you, Hogwarts protectors and Death Eaters alike. You fly in and out of the crowd, weaving and darting and defending, until space and time themselves are a blur. All that remains is one conviction: no more children will lose their lives Lord Voldemort. No more, no more, _no more_.

* * *

You are thirteen years old (sixty-eight), and Voldemort was seventy-one. You float over his lifeless husk, just as he must have stood over yours, and wonder why this man was blessed with nearly sixty more years of life than you were.

You wonder where he's gone. It was fear that kept you tethered to earth, and they say this man lived in terror of death. Yet something tells you that this creature didn't have enough of a soul to leave behind. At the same time, you doubt he's found the peace you turned away from, that you hope your parents have reached. Whatever eternity Lord Voldemort has found, you're sure it's every bit as miserable as he deserves.

Murcia's waiting as you drift out of the locked room where the dark wizard's body is stored. She leans against a wall, robes torn and dirtied, exhausted but alive.

"Find what you were looking for?"

You shrug, not knowing what that was in the first place.

"You know," Murcia says, "I've been thinking. I expect the Ministry's got enough on their plate right now, but after some time's passed, after this is all cleared up … well, I doubt they'd see any reason for a fifty-year-old restraining order to remain in place."

Hope and fear rush through you, both at once. "You'd do that?"

"Can't see why not. After all, Olive Hornby's been gone for ages. As long as you swear never go to after any of her descendants ..."

"Definitely." Whatever animosity you once had towards Olive has all but disappeared, reserved instead for the one who truly warrants it.

"Something else…" Murcia's smiling now in a bittersweet, almost wistful, way. "What was the name of that book you used to love? The Muggle one, that she ripped up the night before … it happened."

An old memory reignites itself in your heart, soft and warm. Your mother reading to you in your London bedroom, when witches and wizards remained confined to written pages, before magical daydreams twisted themselves into nightmares.

"The Hobbit."

"That's the one. I'm thinking of stopping in at a few Muggle bookshops, looking around. It shouldn't be too hard to find."

You frown, feeling she's overlooked one important detail. "…You know I can't turn pages, right?"

"I know." She stands. "That's what I'll be there for."

Murcia reaches out a hand to slip through yours, not even shuddering at the cold.

"If you'll stick around for a while, that is. At least until they let you leave Hogwarts."

"Longer."

All around you, the souls of the battle's victims rise upwards towards the new-day sun. A few falter, fear and indecision written across their faces, and descend back to earth as imprints of their living selves. Most move on, fading into the brilliant sky until they no longer bear form. You yearn to follow them, but the ache is not as painful as it might once have been. This is the path you have chosen.

Yet, for the ones who linger – the frightened, the embittered, the lost, the young – you will be there. You know that what you offer will not be enough, but you will give it anyway. Perhaps among those who remain is another thirteen-year-old, so cheated in life that she chose its imitation, who will come to regret this decision as much as you have. She will need someone to watch over her in death, to remind her that she, too, deserves love, deserves friendship, deserves immortality, regardless of what she has chosen.

You're not sure what emotion this is, or even if it is one. Peace, maybe. Whatever it is, it is your eternity.

You have lost count of how old you are, but time matters very little as Lord Voldemort's first victim watches his last ascend to their rest.

* * *

 **A/N: Well, here it is, guys, the final chapter. If you've stuck with Myrtle for this long, I hope you've enjoyed reading her story, and that you find the ending satisfactorily bittersweet.**

 **I LOVE the idea of Myrtle helping out Dumbledore's Army, and Hogwarts' students in general, during the Carrows' regime. If there's anything we know about her, it's that she hates a bully, and - if she knows the truth about her death - likely hates Voldemort, too. I can't imagine that she, being a murder victim of his while still in school, would take kindly to other children being tortured and traumatized under his rule.**

 **I also wanted Malfoy to serve as the link between Myrtle's act of kindness in Half-Blood Prince and her (hypothetical) greater role during Deathly Hallows, showing that her devotion to him wasn't wasted. I thought long and hard about having him go out of his way to protect a student during a time when he was still technically a Death Eater, but ultimately decided it benefited the story too much to discard. While we don't know much about what Draco did during Deathly Hallows, we do know that he didn't reveal Harry to Bellatrix and the other Death Eaters, and that (according to Cursed Child, at least) he eventually became a much better, less prejudiced person. I figured this could serve as evidence that he's starting to question his parents' ideology and his role in the war. I also thought it would be a good idea to have the near-victim be a Slytherin, since 1) I can see Malfoy being more likely to help someone in his own house, and 2) just as it's a cliche to have all the bullies be Slytherin, it's also a cliche to have everyone the Carrows oppose be in Gryffindor, Hufflepuff, and Ravenclaw. While I didn't intend this boy to have a concrete identity, I sort of imagined him being either Malcolm Baddock or Graham Pritchard, boys sorted into Slytherin in Harry's fourth year.**

 **Myrtle asking to be called by her real name was inspired by one of the few scenes I actually liked in the Cursed Child. Despite my issues with that play, I'm very happy with Myrtle's depiction in it.**

 **I initially planned on Luna having a much greater role, convincing Myrtle to fight at the end like Murcia does in the finished version, but as the writing went on, I realized there just wasn't enough room to introduce and establish a 'new' character so late in the story. Even though I had to cut her appearance down greatly, I'm still pleased with what little I had her do. I definitely feel like she'd be the one to innocently ask those piercing questions that cause people to re-evaluate their choices.**

 **Murcia coming back was actually quite a late addition to the story. Originally, Myrtle was going to reflect on how maybe she could protect a hypothetical descendant of Murcia's, or even Murcia herself, by fighting in the battle, but I eventually decided it would be much more meaningful to have her return in person and actually interact with Myrtle.**

 **Finally, the ending. In very early drafts, Myrtle finding closure and peace by protecting Hogwarts' students was going to give her the ability to move on to the afterlife, thereby reuniting with her parents. I had to wrestle long and hard with myself to decide whether I wanted this optimistic ending, or the more bittersweet one in the final product. Eventually, canon won out - as far as I know, there's no way a ghost in the Harry Potter world can choose to move on, and I'm not going to go against that. Plus, in a story as depressing as Myrtle's, I felt like a sudden happy ending would be incongruous with the tone of the rest of the Fic. I tried to compromise by having Murcia reignite her friendship with Myrtle and take some steps towards making her afterlife more bearable, as well as having Myrtle stay behind to help the ghosts of other young Voldemort victims. That's a whole other story in and of itself, but as far as I know now, I'm not going to write it.**

 **I'm so grateful that I was able to finally finish this story, and I hope that everyone who's gotten this far has enjoyed reading it - and maybe come to look at Myrtle in a bit of a different way. Thank you so much! :)**


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